New Science & Math Books

"Another love letter from Wohlleben to the green world... makes the case for how we should allow forests throughout the world to regrow and in the process help heal not only the climate but us, as well."--Lydia Millet, Oprah Daily

An illuminating manifesto on ancient forests: how they adapt to climate change by passing their wisdom through generations, and why our future lies in protecting them.

In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. Brave the Wild River is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West, at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.

Why are some plants so important to humans? The chemistry of the plants has a lot to do with it! The plant world offers a fascinating way to explore basic chemistry concepts. The spectacular variety of colors, fragrances and other characteristics of plants are driven by the seemingly subtle differences in the structure and properties of organic compounds.

To be published in 14 volumes over the next 12 years, this long-awaited synoptic compendium represents the first and only comprehensive taxonomic guide to the extraordinary diversity of plant life blanketing our continent north of Mexico--including Greenland and the St. Pierre and Miquelon islands. The collaborative effort of more than 30 major U.S. and Canadian botanical institutions, it revises and synthesizes literally thousands of floristic monographs and regional floras published over the last three centuries.

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.