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Ideal for city residents, developers, designers, and officials looking for ways to bring urban environments into harmony with the natural world and make cities more sustainable, Urban Ecology for Citizens and Planners offers a wealth of information and examples that will answer fundamental scientific questions, guide green initiatives, and inform environmental policies and decision-making processes. This book provides an overview of the synergistic relationships between humans and nature that shape the ecology of urban green spaces. It also emphasizes the social and cultural value of nature in cities for human health and well-being. Chapters describe the basic science of natural components and ecosystems in urban areas and explore the idea of biophilic urbanism, the philosophy of building nature into the framework of cities. To illustrate these topics, chapters include projects, case studies, expert insights, and successful citizen science programs from urban areas around the world. Authors Gail Hansen and Joseli Macedo argue that citizens have increasingly important roles to play in the environmental future of the cities they live in. A valuable resource for real-world solutions, this volume encourages citizens and planners to actively engage and collaborate in improving their communities and quality of life.

Chocolate is the center of a massive global industry worth billions of dollars annually, yet its future in our modern world is currently under threat. Here, Dale Walters discusses the problems posed by plant diseases, pests, and climate change, looking at what these mean for the survival of the cacao tree. Walters takes readers to the origins of the cacao tree in the Amazon basin of South America, describing how ancient cultures used the beans produced by the plant, and follows the rise of chocolate as an international commodity over many centuries. He explains that most cacao is now grown on small family farms in Latin America, West Africa, and Indonesia, and that the crop is not easy to make a living from. Diseases such as frosty pod rot, witches’ broom, and swollen shoot, along with pests such as sap-sucking capsids, cocoa pod borers, and termites, cause substantial losses every year. Most alarmingly, cacao growers are beginning to experience the accelerating effects of global warming and deforestation. Projections suggest that cultivation in many of the world’s traditional cacao-growing regions might soon become impossible. Providing an up-to-date picture of the state of the cacao bean today, this book also includes a look at complex issues such as farmer poverty and child labor, and examines options for sustainable production amid a changing climate. Walters shows that the industry must tackle these problems in order to save this global cultural staple and to protect the people who make their livelihoods from producing it.

How we determine what is nature, what is wild, or even what in nature is worth protecting occurs through our human perspective. Whether it is a charismatic manatee or a majestic redwood, we care about and protect the things we love because they offer us something we value. To make this value relevant in the economic marketplace of competing choices, Wild Capital: Nature’s Economic and Ecological Wealth relies on the ecosystem services model, where nature’s value is determined through the services intact ecosystems provide to our well-being. As one of the recreation components of this model, this book uses ecotourism and the changing tourist dynamic, as well as our evolving relationship with nature, to demonstrate how we can assign a measurable worth to natural resources. If a developer or a policy maker can more equitably compare the capital asset value of development with that of wild nature, better decisions regarding economic and ecological trade-offs can be made. Wild Capital then incorporates the cultural bias we have for charismatic megafauna to link policy decisions regarding biodiversity and habitat conservation to those charismatic animals we care about so intensely. The five megafauna case studies provide solid evidence of the role charismatic species can play in protecting our planet’s biodiversity and ensuring our well-being long into the future.