Spirulin: astonishing seaweed
Essay - 8 pages - Ecology & environment
From a biological point of view, Spirulin is one of the oldest inhabitants of the Earth. This cyanobacterium appeared 3.5 billions years ago. It is thought to have achieved photosynthesis for another billion years, until the first plant apparition. It naturally grows between latitudes 35°N and...
Using the examples of organically grown coffee in Mexico and fair trade bananas St-Vincent, this paper argues that a new global 'Green Revolution' is underway
Essay - 5 pages - Ecology & environment
'Globalization is the increasing interdependence, integration and interaction among people and corporations in disparate locations around the world' . This phenomenon can have good effects such as helping developing countries improve their economy or their industry but also their...
Manix - environmental analysis: Objectives and strategy formulation
Essay - 6 pages - Ecology & environment
Manix is a brand belonging to Ansell, a company operating in three business segments (professional health care division, consumer health care gloves and occupational division for gloves and clothing worn for protection). Manix is developed in the consumer health care division, which also supplies...
Global warming may open Northwest Passage
Essay - 3 pages - Ecology & environment
It is almost daily that television news mention environmental and natural disasters in each area of the world. Thus, the recent environmental events in the last years were cyclones like Katrina, tsunamis, floods, dryness… Scientifics don't give a verdict on these events but public opinion...
Environment and international trade
Essay - 5 pages - Ecology & environment
The warming of the planet and global climatic change has been the centre of heated debate for the last few years. The environmental problems, by the force of nature, somehow set themselves to the political agenda of the planet. In this paper I'd like to see if the concepts of trade and...
Coal: energy of the future or energy of the past?
Essay - 4 pages - Ecology & environment
In 2006, Doctor Heinz Scholtholt, member of a German firm of the energy industry (STEAG), pretended that Germany could become the worldwide leader of the coal industry by developing new clean coal technologies. Less than a year later, the German coalition's government has decided to stop its coal...
Institutional Failures of the Global Environmental Governance
Essay - 42 pages - Ecology & environment
Despite a great awareness of environmental questions from developed and developing countries, there is a degradation of environmental issues and an appearance of new environmental problems. This aggravation of environmental matters is due to the inefficient state of the global environmental...
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) : PET-bottles
Essay - 10 pages - Ecology & environment
A life cycle assessment is the investigation and valuation of the environmental impacts of a given product or service caused or necessitated by its existence. It is a variant of input-output analysis focusing on physical rather than monetary flows. The procedures of life cycle assessment (LCA)...
Air transportation and climate change
Essay - 4 pages - Ecology & environment
A sophisticated transport system has evolved in Europe to move people and frets. The air transport industry is growing at rate above the average growth of the economy of the EU: multiplication of short distance flies, the arrival of the “low cost” market, and increasing of aerial fret...
Carbon footprinting
Essay - 9 pages - Ecology & environment
The nature of the carbon footprint is to examine human use of carbon and to try to apply it to how much greenhouse gas (converted to a scale based on CO2) is used. By discussing this, and viewing how "Climate change and infectious diseases in North America: the road ahead" discusses climate, it...
Lacustrine carbonate sedimentation
Essay - 6 pages - Ecology & environment
Lakes act as outdoor laboratories for the observation and understanding of natural processes. Every process has its own signature. If science looks at processes occurring today and their respective characteristics, then the door opens for understanding past processes that have similar...
Corn Ethanol: How realistic is this source?
Essay - 8 pages - Ecology & environment
While the price of gasoline has dropped precipitously since the summer, the memory of $3.80 - $4.00/gallon of gasoline is still fresh in the minds of most Americans. In fact, gasoline is at its lowest price in almost 10 years; however, the American population is still looking to President-elect...
The concept of landscape ecology
Essay - 9 pages - Ecology & environment
Landscape ecology is an emerging discipline that aims to understand the environmental processes and patterns in?uencing habitats and species beyond the site level. It arose independently in the latter part of the twentieth century in central and Eastern Europe and in North America as geographers,...
Perceptions of nature by indigenous communities and their relation to the ecological contexts
Essay - 11 pages - Ecology & environment
The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of how indigenous communities perceive and relate to the bio-ecological contexts of which they are part and on which they depend. The main message is that there is much more to learn from them than information about plant resources or methods...
Perceptions, object and observer of forest landscape and planning
Essay - 7 pages - Ecology & environment
For many centuries people have been concerned with perceptions of the natural world. Philosophers have written about it, psychologists have studied it, and, more recently, foresters have become concerned with it. However, when we speak of ‘perceptions of forest landscapes' in relationship to...
The role of visualization in forest planning
Essay - 8 pages - Ecology & environment
Modern techniques of computer visualization, involving three-dimensional (3D) modeling, computer animation, and virtual reality (VR), are taking their place among decision-support tools for forestry. This article focuses on the emerging role of visualization techniques that simulate the...
Landscape ecology, use and application in forestry
Essay - 6 pages - Ecology & environment
Many ecological processes result in or are affected by spatial patterns. However, the relative importance of different processes is very sensitive to the scale of analysis. For example, at a very local scale, species diversity is often strongly affected by competition and trophic interactions...
Visual analysis of forest landscape
Essay - 11 pages - Ecology & environment
This article examines the broad concepts and methods underpinning the management of visual resources in forestry, and describes some of the key scienti?c methods of addressing the often dif?cult issue of aesthetics and public perceptions of forested landscapes. It draws on accumulated research...
Impact of forest management on the quality of water
Essay - 8 pages - Ecology & environment
In forested catchments the hydrologic cycle, involving precipitation, interception, evapo-transpiration, overland ?ow, subsurface ?ow, groundwater ?ow, and stream ?ow is closely linked to water quality in that water movement through the forest ecosystem also transports sediment, and dissolved...
Forest fires (prediction, prevention and suppression)
Essay - 7 pages - Ecology & environment
The problems and negative impacts associated with large-scale uncontrolled forest ?res have increased worldwide over the past two decades. Globally an estimated 300-400 million hectares of forests and woodlands burn annually, emitting an estimated 9.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases; however,...
Soil erosion control
Essay - 6 pages - Ecology & environment
Soil erosion control in managed forests is undertaken, and best achieved, for two main reasons. The ?rst relates to soil protection for the sustainable productivity of the forest resource. The second relates to the protection of valuable water resources located in forested catchments. The...
Propagation technology for forest trees
Essay - 8 pages - Ecology & environment
There are six major kinds of propagules now available for the reproduction of forest trees: seeds, sprouts, grafts, cuttings, tissue-culture plantlets, and somatic embryos. Each has two or more subclasses, and each has increasingly understood advantages, disadvantages, and uses. For several of...
Genetic aspects of air pollution and climate change
Essay - 6 pages - Ecology & environment
The ?rst incidences of air pollution impacts on the genetic constitution of forest tree populations were those documented near point sources of sulfur dioxide (SO2), particulates, and heavy metals. Localized extinction of forests around these point sources was documented by ecologists in the past...
Genecology and the adaptations of forest trees
Essay - 8 pages - Ecology & environment
Genecology is the study of intraspeci?c genetic variation in relation to environmental conditions. It reveals patterns of adaptation of populations to their environments that result from differences in natural selection among locations. Genecological studies are conducted for the practical...
Cytogenetics of forest tree species
Essay - 9 pages - Ecology & environment
The discipline of cytogenetics was ?rst de?ned by Sutton in 1903, as a ?eld of investigation which developed from the separate sciences of genetics and cytology. It is concerned with studies on the correlation of genetic and cytological (especially chromosomal) features characterizing a...
The global and forest environment carbon cycle
Essay - 5 pages - Ecology & environment
The forest environment carbon cycle can be viewed at a number of scales. Measurements can be made at the scale of an individual leaf or tree, stand-scale measurements can be made, and models can be developed that examine forest-level, regional, and global carbon cycles. The role of the forest in...
Diagnosis, monitoring and evaluation of forest health and protection
Essay - 9 pages - Ecology & environment
Over the last 30 years forest health became a popular issue together with the concern about acid rain, air pollution, and climate change. Terms like forest decline, and the German ‘Waldsterben' (forest death) and ‘Neuartigen Waldscha ¨den' (new type of forest damage) became frequent in...
Environmental impacts on forests
Essay - 7 pages - Ecology & environment
There is considerable debate over de?nitions for the word ‘forest' and even for ‘tree.' Most vegetation types fall clearly into the categories of forest or nonforest, but there is dispute at the margins. A similar debate rages over the classi?cation of forests into natural and arti?cial...
Impacts of air pollution on forest ecosystems
Essay - 10 pages - Ecology & environment
Air pollution problems are international in scale. All forests worldwide experience some degree of air pollution exposure above preindustrial levels. Atmospheric transport processes do not recognize geographic borders, but sources of pollutants, the pollutants of concern, and the speci?c effects...
Natural disturbances in forest environments
Essay - 7 pages - Ecology & environment
Disturbance in plant communities has been de?ned as consisting of ‘the mechanisms which limit the plant biomass by causing its partial or total destruction.' In forests, disturbance arises from the agencies of tree damage or death. At small spatial scales, individual trees die standing or...
