Every piece of land, no matter how remote or untrammeled, has a boundary. While sometimes boundary lines follow topographic or biological features, more often they follow the straight lines of political dictate and compromise. Administrative boundaries nearly always fragment a landscape, resulting in loss of species that must disperse or migrate across borders, increased likelihood of threats such as alien species or pollutants, and disruption of natural processes such as fire. Despite the importance and ubiquity of boundary issues, remarkably little has been written on the subject. Stewardship Across Boundaries fills that gap in the literature, addressing the complex biological and socioeconomic impacts of both public and private land boundaries in the United States. With contributions from natural resource managers, historians, environmentalists, political scientists, and legal scholars, the book: develops a framework for understanding administrative boundaries and their effects on the land and on human behavior examines issues related to different types of boundaries -- wilderness, commodity, recreation, private-public presents a series of case studies illustrating the efforts of those who have cooperated to promote stewardship across boundaries synthesizes the broad complexity of boundary-related issues and offers an integrated strategy for achieving regional stewardshi. Stewardship Across Boundaries should spur open discussion among students, scientists, managers, and activists on this important topic. It demonstrates how legal, social, and ecological conditions interact in causing boundary impacts and why those factors must be integrated to improve land management. It also discusses research needs and will help facilitate critical thinking within the scientific community that could result in new strategies for managing boundaries and their impacts.

In Freshwater Boundaries Revisited, María Querol analyzes the different methods applied in the delimitation of international rivers and lakes and the recent developments in the field.

For anyone who has looked at a map of the United States and wondered how Texas and Oklahoma got their Panhandles, or flown over the American heartland and marveled at the vast grid spreading out in all directions below, American Boundaries will yield a welcome treasure trove of insight. The first book to chart the country’s growth using the boundary as a political and cultural focus, Bill Hubbard’s masterly narrative begins by explaining how the original thirteen colonies organized their borders and decided that unsettled lands should be held in trust for the common benefit of the people. Hubbard goes on to show—with the help of photographs, diagrams, and hundreds of maps—how the notion evolved that unsettled land should be divided into rectangles and sold to individual farmers, and how this rectangular survey spread outward from its origins in Ohio, with surveyors drawing straight lines across the face of the continent. Mapping how each state came to have its current shape, and how the nation itself formed within its present borders, American Boundaries will provide historians, geographers, and general readers alike with the fascinating story behind those fifty distinctive jigsaw-puzzle pieces that together form the United States.