scholarly journals Systematics: Its role in supporting sustainable forest management

2004 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T Huber ◽  
David W Langor

Understanding the natural world around us requires knowledge of its component parts. From an ecological function perspective, these parts are species. Partitioning the world of living things into distinguishable, universally recognized species, each with a unique scientific name, is difficult, especially when one considers the numerous kinds of microscopic organisms that make up most of the planet's biodiversity. Biosystematics is the study of the origin of biological diversity and the evolutionary relationships among species and higher-level groups (taxa). Taxonomy is the theory and practice of identifying, describing, naming and classifying organisms. Despite the emergence of national and international issues and programs concerning conservation of biodiversity, climate change and invasive alien organisms, all of which demand significant taxonomic input and require an increased investment in systematics, Canada's investment in this discipline has not risen to meet the challenge. Since the mid-1970s the number of taxonomists employed by the federal government has been reduced by about one half. Canada must do more than maintain the inadequate status quo by increasing its investment in systematics in order to meet our nation's obligations, both domestically and internationally. Key words: systematics, taxonomy, definitions, importance for biology, sustainable forestry, biodiversity, invasive pests

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-281
Author(s):  
Roxana Oltean

Henry David Thoreau has been celebrated for his observation of the natural world. While noting Thoreau's skills of observation in relation to the natural world and his responsiveness to sensory experience, scholars have, however, tended to privilege sight over sound. Even though Thoreau was recognized by musicians such as Charles Ives and John Cage for having an exceptionally fine ear for the symphonies of nature, sound still remains a neglected aspect of Thoreau's Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. This article is a corrective to this status quo, as it reads Walden as a transmedial project in which Thoreau frequently tuned in to the sounds encountered during his sojourn in nature in order to figure the essential parameters of his experiment and to relate to the entire world of experience. The complex soundscape of Walden engenders a multifaceted awareness of modern space, as sounds of nature, sounds of progress, and the clamor of people intersect. Accordingly, this article explores how Thoreau uses a vast array of sounds to relate to the world; how he apprehended, and even appreciated, not only the harmonies of nature, but also dissonance—within nature, as well as between nature, modernity and rurality. In doing so, this article proposes a reading of Thoreau's auditory experience as a reflection on, and negotiation with, a multifaceted world where the pastoral and the industrial coexist.


Zootaxa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2896 (1) ◽  
pp. 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOE FUNDERBURK ◽  
MARK HODDLE

Laurence Alfred Mound became interested in taxonomy after two postgraduate periods at the British Museum of Natural History (now the Natural History Museum) in London where he discovered biological diversity and the endless variety of living things. While working in Nigeria and the Sudan, and studying variation in whitefly populations, he gained an appreciation for the great differences within species in behavior and morphology under varying environmental conditions. He was appointed to the British Museum of Natural History in 1964 where he worked on the taxonomy of thrips, whiteflies, and aphids until he retired as Keeper of Entomology in 1992. He now lives in Canberra, Australia, serving as an Honorary Research Fellow, CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences at the Black Mountain Campus. Driving questions motivate him and provide insight into his thinking of the natural world: Why are there so many species of insects, yet so few species of thrips? Why so many at one place but so few at another? Do environmental and host plant factors drive the astonishing levels of morphological variation seen in single species? If so why? Why do so few thrips vector plant viruses, but why are those few so successful? Why are so many thrips associated with Acacia trees in Australia but so few on other plants? To address these questions and as part of his ongoing efforts to document the biodiversity of thrips, Laurence Mound has established 90 new Thysanoptera genera, and described 641 new species of thrips. These taxonomic designations are new hypotheses inviting scrutiny and study.  At the time this document was written Laurence’s research articles had been cited almost 1,300 times. Here we review Laurence Mound’s career to this point, and we discuss the quality and quantity of his remarkable accomplishments in taxonomy, as well as highlighting his distinctive personal characteristics.


World Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3(55)) ◽  
pp. 46-52
Author(s):  
Котяш Ірина Сергіївна ◽  
Федорова Юлія Олександрівна

This article examines the essence of the concepts that form the natural world as well as highlight the representatives who worked with such direction. Worldview is shown as versatile as integrating knowledge and a sense of belief and practical, because it focuses on solving major problems of human existence, expresses the imperatives of human behavior and the meaning of life. Concepts are identified that provide an effective impact of the educational environment on the educational paradigm. Significant changes in the theory and practice of the educational process in the formation of a new education system in Ukraine are described. Worldview culture is seen as an integral quality of personality that develops in the process of education and upbringing, self-study and self-education. It characterizes the attitude of the person to the world, outlook potential, awareness, which are reflected in various aspects of activity, in particular professional.


Author(s):  
Carlos Frühbeck Moreno

This article aims to study María Sánchez’s poetry from an ecofeminist point of view. In particular, her work Cuaderno de campo is interpreted – following her last essay Tierra de mujeres – as an attempt to create a new feminine voice through the transgression of fixed discursive patterns. Specifically, we will focus on how poetry can ‘sabotage’ scientific discourse in order to build a new narrative that is able to overcome an approach to the natural world based on domination and exploitation. In fact, from its closeness to Nature, this voice claims a new identity based on the ethics of care and the understanding of the world as a web where all living things depend on each other.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laila Fariha Zein ◽  
Adib Rifqi Setiawan

In today’s world, it is easier and easier to stay connected with people who are halfway across the world. Social media and a globalizing economy have created new methods of business, trade and socialization resulting in vast amounts of communication and effecting global commerce. Like her or hate her, Kimberly Noel Kardashian West as known as Kim Kardashian has capitalized on social media platforms and the globalizing economy. Kim is known for two things: famous for doing nothing and infamous for a sex tape. But Kim has not let those things define her. With over 105 million Instagram followers and 57 million Twitter followers, Kim has become a major global influence. Kim has travelled around the world, utilizing the success she has had on social media to teach make-up master classes with professional make-up artist, Mario Dedivanovic. She owns or has licensed several different businesses including: an emoji app, a personal app, a gaming app, a cosmetics line, and a fragrance line. Not to be forgotten, the Kardashian family show, ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ has been on the air for ten years with Kim at the forefront. Kim also has three books: ‘Kardashian Konfidential’, ‘Dollhouse’, and ‘Selfish’. With her rising social media following, Kim has used the platforms to show her support for politicians and causes, particularly, recognition of the Armenian genocide. Kim also recently spoke at the Forbes’ women’s summit. Following the summit, Kim tweeted out her support for a recent movement on Twitter, #freeCyntoiaBrown which advocated for a young woman who claimed to have shot and killed the man who held her captive as a teenage sex slave in self-defense. Kim had her own personal lawyers help out Cyntoia on her case. Kim has also moved beyond advocating for issues within the confines of the United States. As mentioned earlier, she is known for advocating for recognition of the Armenian genocide. In the last two years, her show has made it a point to address the Armenian situation as it was then and as it is now. Kim has been recognized as a global influencer by others across the wordl. We believe Kim has become the same as political leaders when it comes to influencing the public. Kim’s story reveals that the new reality creates a perfect opportunity for mass disturbances or for initiating mass support or mass disapproval. Although Kim is typically viewed for her significance to pop culture, Kim’s business and social media following have placed her deep into the mix of international commerce. As her businesses continue to grow and thrive, we may see more of her influence on international issues and an increase in the commerce from which her businesses benefit.


According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.


Author(s):  
Richard Healey

The metaphor that fundamental physics is concerned to say what the natural world is like at the deepest level may be cashed out in terms of entities, properties, or laws. The role of quantum field theories in the Standard Model of high-energy physics suggests that fundamental entities, properties, and laws are to be sought in these theories. But the contextual ontology proposed in Chapter 12 would support no unified compositional structure for the world; a quantum state assignment specifies no physical property distribution sufficient even to determine all physical facts; and quantum theory posits no fundamental laws of time evolution, whether deterministic or stochastic. Quantum theory has made a revolutionary contribution to fundamental physics because its principles have permitted tremendous unification of science through the successful application of models constructed in conformity to them: but these models do not say what the world is like at the deepest level.


Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.


Author(s):  
Rhodes Pinto

This paper advances a new interpretation of the manner in which Anaxagoras regards nous as producing motion and, in so doing, explains Anaxagoras’ emphasis on nous’s purity and offers a major reassessment of the explanatory value of nous. Based on a fresh examination of the evidence, I argue that Anaxagoras holds that considerable difference between things is itself productive of motion. On account of nous’s purity there is always a difference between nous and the mixture (comprising everything else) such as to produce motion, with the specific sort of motion being determined by nous’s intent (based on its judgement) or affect. Taking into account what nous brings about, including the cosmic vortex that orders the world and the preservation of living things (by being present in them as their soul), Anaxagoras can be recognized as having offered the framework for a wide-reaching teleology with his conception of nous.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document