What is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices, and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls? In Landscapes and Labscapes, Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places, and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments." He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Nineteen papers representing the results of a project funded by the Commission of the European Communities to study macrotidal estuaries from the Elbe to the Tagus in a comparative and coherent manner by way of a standardized methodology. The papers address topics in primary production, bacterial processes, zooplankton, hyperbenthos, meiobenthos, macrobenthos, and modeling. A major result of the comparison is that salinity gradients explain species succession within each estuary, yet similar succession series are found at different salinity levels in different estuaries. The volume is reprinted from Hydrobiologia, v.311, 1995. Includes graphs and maps. Lacks an index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR