Focuses on plant communities in the British uplands, bringing together the upland communities described in the National Vegetation Classification, together with several assemblages of plant species. A key enables the user to classify vegetation in the field and distribution maps provide many localities for communities.

Upland Habitats presents a comprehensive illustrated guide to the habits wildlife and conservation of Britains last wilderness areas. These include: heather moors, sheep walk deer forest, blanket bogs, montane and sub-montane forests. The book examines the unique characteristics of uplands and the ecological processes and historical events that have shaped them since the end of the last glaciaton. Among the key conservation and management issues explored in are: * modern agricultural practices and economics * habitat degradation through overgrazing * commercial forest plantations * the persecution of wildlife * recreation in the uplands * the funding of upland farming.

A photographic guide to habitats, this lavishly illustrated book provides a comprehensive overview of the natural history and conservation landscape of Britain and Ireland. In essence a field guide, the book leads the reader through all the main habitat types, with information on their characteristics, extent, geographical variation, key species, cultural importance, origins and conservation. It aims to help visitors to the countryside recognize the habitats around them, understand how they have evolved and what makes them special, and imagine how they might change in the future.

A cultural history of a reddish, much-loved shrub, sometimes called mountain ash or dogberry. Rowan is the first in-depth natural and cultural history of this much-loved plant sometimes called mountain ash or dogberry. Through myth, medicine, literature, land art, and contemporary rewilding, Oliver Southall uncovers the many meanings of this singular reddish, fruit shrub: a potent symbol of nostalgia on the one hand and of environmental activism on the other. Taking the reader on an eclectic journey across history, Rowan charts our changing relationships with nature and landscape, raising urgent questions about how we value and relate to the non-human world.

The successful conservation of bird species relies upon our understanding of their habitat use and requirements. In the coming decades the importance of such knowledge will only grow as climate change, the development of new energy sources and the needs of a growing human population intensify the, already significant, pressure on the habitats that birds depend on. Drawing on valuable recent advances in our understanding of bird-habitat relationships, this book provides the first major review of avian habitat selection in over twenty years. It offers a synthesis of concepts, patterns and issues that will interest students, researchers and conservation practitioners. Spatial scales ranging from landscape to habitat patch are covered, and examples of responses to habitat change are examined. European landscapes are the main focus, but the book has far wider significance to similar habitats worldwide, with examples and relevant material also drawn from North America and Australia.

Excerpt from Illustrated Guide to the Trees and Flowers of England and Wales This book is intended to help the ordinary nature-lover, who may perhaps have little or no special knowledge of botany, to find out the names of such trees and flowers as he meets with. If, knowing the name, he will turn for further information to one of the larger works mentioned below, so much the better, but the name must come first. With plants as with human beings, the first step towards a friendship, with all its future possibilities of interest and delight, is to learn your friend's name. No doubt even ignorant people get some sort of enjoyment out of nature, but it makes all the difference in the world to the pleasure of a country walk when, on every hedge-bank and in every ditch, we catch Sight of familiar acquaintances, which we have learnt to greet by name, and to recognize as friends. The method of using the illustrated Key is explained in Part IV. Of course, several Keys exist already, such as the excellent one in bentham's British Flora, but these are mostly couched in very technical language, and Often presuppose more Skill and experience than the beginner has at his command. In the present work technical terms are avoided as far as possible, and the Key is founded on plain and easily observed characters, and such as do not involve dissection. But the special feature of the book lies in the illustrations accompanying the text, which help to make its meaning clear at a glance. These figures are necessarily very small, and do not pretend to be complete pictures Of the plants, but simply to illustrate the special characters used for the Key. By far the greater number of them were drawn direct from nature, for the particular purpose to which they are here applied. The method of the Key allows the groups of Trees and Shrubs, and the Aquatic Plants, to be treated by themselves, and thus makes it possible to identify most of these without depending on their flowers, which are so Often difficult to examine, or absent. In Short, the book aims especially at being practical, without, it is hoped, forfeiting all claim to be scientific. It tries to help the learner very much as a botanical friend might do, by pointing out, to the eye and the understanding at once, such characteristics as are found, by actual experience, to be easily recognized and remembered. The first draft of the Key was written more than twenty years ago, and almost every part of it has been altered and amended to meet practical difficulties. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Trees Beyond the Wood was written for a conference organised to celebrate twenty years of work since the first major conference on the theme of ancient trees and woodlands held in Sheffield, UK. It was held almost ten years after the landmark 2003 Working and Walking in the Footsteps of Ghosts event which started to raise issues and challenge assumptions about what is 'ancient' or 'natural' and what is meant by the terms 'wood' or 'woodland'. Since then on-going work in a range of disciplines across ecology, biology, landscape history, archaeology, forestry and nature conservation has continued the process of research and evaluation across the subject area. The collection of papers by contributors from across Europe reflects this broad range of interests and disciplines.