New Science & Math Books

Situating climate change within the context of the Anthropocene, Andrew Mathews investigates how people in Lucca, Italy, make sense of social and environmental change by caring for the morphologies of trees and landscapes. He analyzes how people encounter climate change, not by thinking and talking about climate, but by caring for the environments around them.

A revelatory journey of discovery into the intricate, beautiful, and often surprising processes that convert energy from the sun into life, and how all-important these are to our survival--and our planet's futureThe revelatory vision of How Light Makes Life is how we ourselves might harness the power of photosynthesis: to repair ecosystems, stabilize the climate, and grow more food sustainably.

This volume presents a dazzling portrait of the twentieth century through the eyes of a pioneering Indian woman scientist-- the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II, the struggle for Indian Independence, the social relations of science movement, the Lysenko affair, the so-called green revolution, the dawn of environmentalism

Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree takes you on a journey to connect with trees through the sense most aligned to our emotions and memories. Thirteen essays are included that explore the evocative scents of trees, from the smell of a book just printed as you first open its pages, to the calming scent of Linden blossom, to the ingredients of a particularly good gin & tonic: In your hand: a highball glass, beaded with cool moisture

This book delves into the complex history of the gardening movement in schools and examines the question why gardens should be built in schools. It offers practical guidance for teachers to begin thinking about how to approach educational gardening.

Decades of research document plants' impressive abilities: they communicate with each other, manipulate other species, and move in sophisticated ways. Lesser known, however, is that although plants may not have brains, their internal workings reveal a system not unlike the neuronal networks running through our own bodies.

As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn't monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees. Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world's foremost arbornauts, known as the "real-life Lorax."

At a moment when the planet is so clearly in peril, the trees stand as both guardians and messengers. They have words for us--if only we would listen. This collection of essays by artists, activists, ecologists, and advocates discusses the many ways in which humans need trees, and how our future is laced into their roots and their branches.

After making a strange discovery on a childhood trip to Ikea--a stand of sap-sucking, leafless broomrapes, stealing nutrients from their neighbors' roots--Chris Thorogood dreamed of becoming a botanist and would stop at nothing to feed his growing addiction to plants. In his hair-raising adventures across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Thorogood treads a death-defying path over cliffs, up erupting volcanoes, through typhoons, and out into the very heart of the world's vast, green wilderness.

Environmental pollution as a consequence of diverse human activities has become a global concern. Urbanization, mining, industrial revolution, burning of fossil fuels/firewood and poor agricultural practices, in addition to improper dumping of waste products, are largely responsible for the undesirable change in the environment composition.

A marvelously illustrated look at the world's diverse forests and their ecosystems that offers a beautiful introduction to what forests are, how they work, how they grow, and how we map, assess, and conserve them.

Humans have always revered long-lived trees. Our veneration took a modern turn in the eighteenth century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the industrial revolution.

Outlines the steps in a phylogenetic analysis that follow the generation of most parsimonious trees. In addition, character reliability approaches and methods of analysis for morphometric characters are summarized. The algorithm used throughout the book is TNT, a freely available software package able to summarize and compare multiple trees produced by ambiguous datasets, or analyses of different datasets.

CO₂ is plant food. But it's more complicated than that. In this book, prominent plant biologist and climate scientist Lewis Ziska explains the complex, mixed results we get when CO₂ in the atmosphere increases.

introduces and demonstrates data integration, manipulation and visualization of phylogenetic trees using a suite of R packages, tidytree, treeio, ggtree and ggtreeExtra.