Documents in comprehensive detail a major environmental crisis: rapidly declining amphibian populations and the disturbing developmental problems that are increasingly prevalent within many amphibian species.

Fish species that migrate within the great rivers of South America support important local fisheries but are little known outside their native range. This book represents the first collection of the work of local scientific experts on these remarkable fish. The authors cover the Upper Parani, Paraguay-Parani, Uruguay and Suo Francisco basins in Brazil, as well as the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon. They discuss not only the principal migratory species and their fascinating relationship with the water cycle in the rivers and wetlands, but also the fisheries they support, and their often precarious conservation status."

Providing a detailed account of the law of nature conservation, this book reviews and discusses the way in which the law promotes the conservation of species of animal, bird, and plant, and how it protects natural habitats for protected species. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book sets nature conservation in its economic and scientific context. It explains how the law reconciles the public interest in promoting biodiversity and the conservation of species and habitats, on the one hand, and the private property rights of landowners and other resource appropriators on the other. The book offers an illuminating new interpretation of this area of environmental regulation using a resource allocation model of property rights to explain how legal and economic instruments for promoting nature conservation work in practice. The analysis covers all recent legislation and case law - including the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009, the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2010 and the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework. The book will serve as a critical guide to UK nature conservation law for those working in the system, and a valuable reference point on the UK's approach to the area for environmental lawyers and policy-makers overseas.

This book attempts to move the family of squirrels (Sciuridae) out of the shadow of large charismatic mammals and to highlight management failures with the goal of moving towards an improved conservation approach. Particular attention is paid to the influence of taxonomic science on squirrel conservation. In addition, the authors show how human-driven climate change, global change and modern politics are shaping global squirrel populations as well as their surrounding environments and ecosystems. Squirrels are widespread around the globe, naturally occurring on every continent except Antarctica and Oceania, and they are certainly among the animals most commonly encountered in everyday life. Despite this, the authors of this volume identify worrying gaps in squirrel conservation. Squirrels are often hunted, trapped, poached, and stressed, and management strategies and legislation are often devised in the absence of proper knowledge of issues such as population sizes, taxonomies, and trends. Together, this can result in severe population declines and even species extinction. By assessing their taxonomic situation, ecology, the evolution and divergence of Sciuridae around the globe, and squirrels’ well-being across habitats, the authors set a baseline from which to launch future investigations into the conservation of squirrels and other species. Additionally, the authors highlight the influences of climate change, unsustainable growth, and various man-made threats to the future of this family.

Today there are 6,800 reptile species on earth; the major groups are alligators and crocodiles, turtles, lizards, and snakes. Reptiles are tetrapods and amniotes, animals whose embryos are surrounded by an amniotic membrane. Today they are represented by four surviving orders: crocodilia (crocodiles, caimans and alligators), sphenodontia (tuataras from New Zealand, squamata (lizards, snakes and amphisbaenids - "worm-lizards"), and testudines (turtles).

A series of original papers and reviews dealing with the peculiarities of island insects and their conservation in many parts of the world. Contributions to this special issue of Journal of Insect Conservation range from biogeographical analyses and ecological features of island insects and their evolution to the variety of concerns for their wellbeing, and practical conservation through a variety of, sometimes novel, approaches. They provide a valuable and up-to-date resource for entomologists and conservation practitioners.