John Clare, Herbalism, and Elegy

Discussions of Clare's engagement with botany often trace his fraught relationship with taxonomy, exploring his admiration for common names over the ‘dark system’ of Linnaean classification. This essay expands understanding of Clare's botanical imagination by considering how he brings his botanical ‘taste’ to bear on the flower as a key figure of elegiac consolation. I refocus attention on his formative preference for pre-Linnaean herbalism and explore how it informs his engagement with elegiac tradition and imagery, especially in relation to Gray's ‘Elegy’. I attend to how herbalism is brought into relationship with poetic representations of the floral, focussing especially on the connection between Clare's preference for herbals and Elizabeth Kent's Flora Domestica. I then discuss ‘Cauper Green’ and ‘The Village Doctress’ (Clare's most sustained poetic discussions of herbalism) as elegies that try to reconcile the finite temporality of human life with the regenerative life cycles of plants and their flowers.

The Classification and Quantification of Geodiversity: Addressing Conceptual and Empirical Challenges

<p>The 21<sup>st</sup> century has seen a growing interest for the understanding and quantification of geodiversity – i.e. ‘the natural range (diversity) of geological (rocks, minerals, fossils), geomorphological (landform, physical processes) and soil features’ (Gray, 2004). To date, though, most quantification efforts focus on geosites and geoheritage, which are a mere segment of geodiversity, namely that considered relevant or valuable. Quantification of geodiversity as a whole has only emerged within the last few years and has its own limitations.</p><p>This presentation addresses some key challenges in the classification and quantification of geodiversity, while considering conceptual, structural and empirical analogies between geodiversity and biodiversity.</p><p>From a spectrum view, material geodiversity is both infinite and finite, with infinite being at the low end of the spectrum and finite being at the high end of it; infinite lithospheric matter merges into finite micro-, meso- and macro-scale landforms, which further combine into ‘even more finite’ landform assemblages, land systems and landscapes.</p><p>1. Classifying such an exceptional range is a challenge in itself. Older, very specific classifications, based on physical, chemical, etc. criteria, exist for segments of geodiversity: rocks, soils and minerals. More recent, general classifications, based largely on formation processes, were elaborated for geosites and later for all geodiversity features (Ruban, 2010; Bradbury, 2014). These classifications share similarities with the Linnaean classification of living organisms (e.g. a hierarchical structure with analogous groups). The first are descriptive. The latter are genetic.</p><p>For quantification purposes, classifications should be established based on characteristics that are least prone to change. Thus, descriptive classifications based on observed attributes rely less on interpretation and are more stable. Genetic classifications are more problematic and may not be very suitable; unlike living organisms, where each individual is associated with a single Species, geodiversity features can be classified, based on formation processes, under multiple Types, Themes and Classes. This makes double (or multiple) counting imminent.</p><p>2. For a more realistic picture, geodiversity should, as much as possible, be quantified at low levels, where division of features/units is either impossible or redundant (e.g. infinite geodiversity, micro-scale landforms). The lower we go within the spectrum, the more diversity we encounter. The higher we go, the more likely we are to move from what is essentially a quantification of elements to a quantification of categories; that is, a concrete measurement is at risk of being replaced with an abstract measurement.</p><p>Different aspects of geodiversity can be calculated by mathematical functions, but use of metrics should be consistent with scale. Finite geodiversity, unlike biological communities, has well-defined boundaries and is less mobile; quantification is more straightforward and less affected by unknown variables. Infinite geodiversity, like biological individuals, is composed of identical elements; quantification is more complex and may require use of functions/estimators.</p><p> </p><p>References</p><p>Bradbury, J., 2014. A keyed classification of natural geodiversity for land management and nature conservation purposes. PGA, 125(3), 329-349</p><p>Gray, M., 2004. Geodiversity: Valuing and Conserving Abiotic Nature. John Willey & Sons</p><p>Ruban, D. A., 2010. Quantification of geodiversity and its loss. PGA, 121(3), 326-333</p>

Percepção Entomológica de Graduandos da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, ES, Brasil

O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar e comparar o nível de percepção dos estudantes dos cursos de graduação do Centro de Ciências Agrárias da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (CCA/UFES) em relação aos insetos. Os dados foram coletados por meio do preenchimento de questionários pelos estudantes entre os meses de junho e agosto de 2013. A hipótese testada e comprovada foi a de que os estudantes dos cursos de Agronomia, Ciências Biológicas Bacharelado, Ciências Biológicas Licenciatura, Engenharia Florestal e Zootecnia teriam um maior índice de acertos e maior nível de conscientização, já que apresentam, em sua grade curricular, disciplinas em que o grupo dos insetos é abordado. Os estudantes, em geral, demonstraram percepções ambíguas em relação aos insetos, como sentimentos de “medo”, “nojo” e “curiosidade”, que foi a principal sensação que os insetos causam nos alunos entrevistados. A principal fonte de conhecimento sobre os insetos citada pelos alunos foi a “escola”. Além disso, os discentes estão conscientes dos malefícios e benefícios trazidos pelos insetos, sendo a importância ecológica o benefício mais citado. Portanto, apesar de alguns equívocos na classificação de certos seres vivos como insetos, tendo como base a classificação lineana, os alunos entrevistados, em geral, mostraram-se conscientes da importância desses animais no ecossistema.Entomologic Perception by Undergraduate Students of Federal University of Espírito Santo, ES, Brazil.Abstract. The objective of this study was to evaluate and compare the level of students' perceptions of the various graduation courses at the Centro de Ciências Agrárias da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (CCA/UFES) in relation to insects. Data were collected by completing of a questionnaire by the students between the months of June and August 2013. The tried and tested hypothesis was that students of Agronomy, Bachelor in Biological Science, Biological Science Teacher Education, Forest Engineering and Zootechny have a higher hit rate and a higher level of awareness, since they have in their curriculum, disciplines they the group of insects is discussed. The students generally demonstrated ambiguous perceptions of the insects, as feelings of "fear", "disgust" and “curiosity” which was the main feeling that insects cause in the students interviewed. The main source of knowledge about insects cited by students was the “school”. In addition, are aware of the harms and benefits brought by the insects, and the ecological importance, the most cited benefit. Therefore, despite some mistakes in the classification of certain living being like insects, based on the Linnaean classification, the students interviewed, in general, were shown to be aware of the importance of these animals in the ecosystem.

Introduction

As the oceans cover 70% of the earth’s surface, marine sediments constitute the second largest habitat on earth, after the ocean water column, and yet we still know more about the dark side of the moon than about the biota of this vast habitat. The primary aim of this book is to give an overview of the biota of marine sediments from an ecological perspective—we will talk of the benthos, literally the plants and animals at the bottom of the sea, but we will also use the term to include those organisms living on the intertidal sediments, the sands and muds of the shore. Given that most of that area is below the zone where light penetrates, the photic zone, the area is dominated by the animals and so we will concentrate on this component. Many of the early studies of marine sediments were taxonomic, describing new species. One of the pioneers was Carl von Linnaeus (1707–1778), the great Swedish biologist who developed the Linnaean classification system for organisms that is still used today (but under threat from some molecular biologists who argue that the Linnaean system is outdated and propose a new system called Phylocode). Linnaeus described hundreds of marine species, many of which come from marine sediments. The British marine biologist Edward Forbes was a pioneer who invented the dredge to sample marine animals that lived below the tidemarks. Forbes showed that there were fewer species as the sampled depth increased and believed that the great pressures at depths meant that no animals would be found deeper than 600 m. This was disproved by Michael Sars who in 1869 used a dredge to sample the benthos at 600 m depth off the Lofoten islands in Norway. Sars found 335 species and in fact was the first to show that the deep sea (off the continental shelf) had high numbers of species. Following these pioneering studies, one of the earliest systematic studies of marine sediments was the HMS Challenger expedition of 1872–1876, the first global expedition. The reports of the expedition were extensive but were mostly descriptive, relating to taxonomy and general natural history.