If you’ve ever had a medical check-up, did you wonder why they put a cuff around your forearm, gave it a squeeze, and made you sit still and quiet? Or why they asked you to open your mouth so they could stick a thermometer under your tongue? Or put that cold stethoscope against your chest while you took deep breaths followed by sticking a clothespin thingamabob on your finger? What’s up with all the gizmos and gadgets and why all the bother?

What’s up is that all of these instruments measure the conditions of some of the most important, life-supporting functions, or vital signs, which keep your carcass from becoming, well, a carcass. The squeezy cuff is reading your blood pressure, which indicates how strongly your blood is pumping through your pipes. The thermometer measures your core body temperature, which affects many chemical reactions in your body that supply energy for your cells. With a stethoscope, the swooshing sound of air moving in and out of your lungs can be listened to. And the clothespin doohickey tracks the amount of oxygen being carried by your blood. Vital signs are critical indicators of your body’s overall health. By tracking them as you grow and mature, these measurements can be used as a guide or reference point for when your body isn’t feeling all that great.

Now what does your blood pressure have to do with US National Parks? While human vital signs are important in evaluating your body’s health, ecological vital signs are indicators for measuring ecosystem health. An ecosystem is a community of living organisms like frogs, trees, or bacteria, and nonliving materials such as water, dirt, and rocks that are located together and interact on some level. In a healthy ecosystem, all of the living and nonliving members exist in a state of natural balance in harmony with their environment. When something new enters the community, say a strange weed or insect, or something in the environment shifts, such as the air temperature becoming warmer, the health of the ecosystem can be threatened. Monitoring ecological vital signs gives scientists a reference point or baseline of the natural condition and alerts them when there is a change. While a healthy ecosystem can continue to support all its members and adapt to change, sometimes changes are too great and members of the ecosystem become stressed and have a hard time keeping up.

Although US National Parks are some of the most protected areas on the planet, the ecological health of many of these carefully safeguarded lands is increasingly uncertain due to our rapidly changing global environment. Here we present a collection of articles about how we study and understand the health of park ecosystems by measuring and tracking the condition of ecological vital signs. This scientific data helps park managers protect the valued resources of our parks and lessen harmful impacts when change is inevitable.

America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them. From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

Outstanding photographs accompany the insightful text of two of the nation's most avid environmentalists in this celebration of America's boundless beauty and grandeur. 250 full-color photos.

There are many conferences, workshops and meetings annually around the world, each emphasizing a specialty area for scientific exploration and research. Yet in very few instances, if at all, do the multidisciplinary aspects of science get presented so one may see the diversity of dependencies these seemingly disparate disciplines actually have. The Explorers Club and the U. S. National Park Service collaborated to make a first attempt at what will continue to be an "ocean pulse'" effort; conferences combining the aquaculture sciences; the search for underwater antiquities and the marinelbio-technologies utilized to explore these areas. The purpose has been to bring together not just academicians to talk about their finding in the field or the laboratory, but to provide a forum for the practical applications of "technology" to expanding our worlds fisheries as well as to continue to explore our world's oceans; the earth's truly last frontier. After everything is said and done, we still know precious little about our ocean environments. Their influences on our lives are monumental and yet we continue to be very parochial and conservative in our dedication to exploring their depths and resources. We feel confident that this initial effort by our respective groups to awaken a realization in the public and private sectors of the need for a cross-disciplinary approach to scientific research in the marine environment, is a necessity as we approach the 21 st century. Kevin C.

Profiling 60 parks--from battlefields to national seashores--administered by the National Park Service, this edition also provides a brief glimpse at 29 additional parks, including the newly created Indiana Sand Dunes.and Dunes.

Throughout history, many people have escaped to nature either permanently or temporarily to rest and recharge. Richard L. Proenneke, a modern-day Henry David Thoreau, is no exception. Proenneke built a cabin in Twin Lakes, Alaska in 1968 and began thirty years of personal growth, which he spent growing more connected to the wilderness in which he lived. This guide through Proenneke’s memories follows the journey that began with One Man’s Wilderness, which contains some of Proenneke’s journals. It continues the story and reflections of this mountain man and his time in Alaska. The editor, John Branson, was a longtime friend of Proenneke’s and a park historian. He takes care that Proenneke’s journals from 1974-1980 are kept exactly as the author wrote them. Branson’s footnotes give a background and a new understanding to the reader without detracting from Proenneke’s style. Anyone with an interest in conservation and genuine wilderness narratives will surely enjoy and treasure this book.