From The United States Forest Service:

“This publication presents a history of the Forest Survey (now known as Forest Inventory and Analysis) program in the United States as it evolved within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service over a period of more than 100 years. It draws on the writings of several authors who have published on various aspects of the Forest Survey program. A review is presented of nine ground plot designs used in the Forest Survey and Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) programs since 1931. This publication also highlights the major events contributing to the current FIA program, beginning as far back as 1830.
It is impressive to look at the many contributions of various people working with the Nation’s Forest Survey program, as well as the various methodologies that have contributed to understanding and updating the national forest survey statistics.
It is especially timely that this historical report should occur at the time the Forest Service just celebrated the anniversary of its 100 years of service to the American people.”

As a result, users will experience approximately 2-4 hours of downtime on that date, between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. EST. A message will be posted to the IEEE Xplore home page to alert your users to the planned downtime. Please encourage your users to take this into account when they plan their research.

This update includes the following features:
*Tabbed search results, including a beta test of Application Notes, practical content for working engineers
*Citation (Known Item) search, RefWorks/BibTeX citation download, and improved author search
*Subscriptions to IEEE Expert Now educational courses available through the IEEE Xplore platform

BioMed Central today announced the launch of Biology Image Library, an online resource that provides access to over 11,000 carefully selected biology-related images. This is the latest service from BioMed Central, part of the Science Navigation Group of companies which was also responsible for the creation of images.MD, a popular medical image resource.

The Library is a new subscription-based service offering access to an annotated selection of high-quality biological images, movies, illustrations and animations. Subscribers may make royalty-free use of images in the collection for research and educational purposes, while commercial usage rights will be available for an additional fee.

“Biology Image Library will be an invaluable resource for biological researchers and educators” said Matthew Cockerill, Publisher, BioMed Central. “Researchers often maintain their own collections of useful images, but until now there has been no easy way for others to find them. By annotating the best images, making them searchable and accessible, and licensing them to allow convenient reuse, Biology Image Library will help academics and other biologists to illustrate their work and to create eye-catching presentations and course material.”

Biology Image Library gives researchers, teachers and students an easy way to find and download high-quality visual material. All content comes from sources that are peer-reviewed by academic editors prior to publication online, so researchers can be sure that the images are scientifically reliable. Subjects covered include developmental biology, histology & pathology, immunology, microbiology & parasitology, molecular & cellular biology, neuroscience and plant biology.

The Biology Image Library is continuously working to expand its collection of images. Potential contributors should email:
info@biologyimagelibrary.com or see
http://www.biologyimagelibrary.com/contribute for more information.

To view Biology Image Library and register for a free trial, visit http://www.biologyimagelibrary.com.

Complementary content will be presented at our sister web portal, www.biofpr.com. The portal is under construction, but users may register their interest in receiving email updates when the site goes live later in 2007. Visit www.biofpr.com now to register and enter a free prize draw! Biofpr.com will supplement the journal by providing immediate news, features and patent coverage, as well as interactive discussions and debate.

Product Information

Open Access to first issue

“A new portal that crosses both international and database boundaries was launched recently for people interested in scientific sources that are unavailable through commercial search engines such as Google.

WorldWideScience.org was developed by the Energy Department and the British Library, along with science and technology organizations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. It employs federated search technology — a search method that simultaneously executes a query against an array of databases, then aggregates and ranks the results — and gives users a single entry point for searching far-flung science portals in parallel with only one query.

“Scientific research results are archived globally in a plethora of sources, many unknown and unreachable through [the] usual search engines,” said Raymond Orbach, Energy’s undersecretary for science. “This international partnership will open up this vast reservoir of knowledge in a rapid and convenient manner, something that will add great value to our existing knowledge.”

WorldWideScience.org follows the model of Science.gov, the searchable portal for science databases of federal science agencies. WorldWideScience.org was developed and is maintained by Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information, which also played a central role in the development of Science.gov. The participating countries contributed databases that can be searched through the portal.”

From Canterbury University Press:

“Estuaries are places where rivers meet the sea, and they have a unique environment as a result of the mixing of fresh water with seawater. They provide diverse opportunities for observing and understanding wildlife.

This guide to the estuarine environment describes the dominant organisms and their ecology.

Based on the successful formula of an earlier book (Animals of the Estuary Shore), Life in the Estuary includes easy to use keys and illustrations to identify many common species of plants and animals, including invertebrates, birds and fish.

Although based primarily on organisms found within the Avon-Heathcote Estuary, Christchurch, this book is an ideal beach-combing companion for the identification of common species found throughout New Zealand in estuaries, mudflats, rocky shores, salt marshes, sand and surf beaches.

From Routledge:

“This new study shows how environmental issues represent a deep problem in conceptualising the relationship between human beings and nature.

This key relationship grounds the implicit ethical and political concerns of International Relations and our understandings of environmental politics. It demonstrates that the core theoretical orientations of the study of International Relations are not only incapable of understanding and responding to contemporary problems, but are profoundly complicit in creating the ecological problems in the first place.

This major book develops a sense of these realities based on the thinking of Martin Heidegger. It forwards new ways of rethinking the environmental questions and addresses crucial issues such as sovereignty, the International Law of The Sea, the Kyoto Protocol, Northern Alaskan oil exploration and exploitation and the impact of the United Nations Convention on the Law of The Sea III.

This is essential specialist reading for readers concerned with the environment.”

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From Oxford University Press

“Modernizing Nature contributes to the debate regarding the origins, institutionalization, and politics of the sciences and systems of knowledge underlying colonial frameworks of environmental management. It departs from the widely prevalent scholarly perspective that colonial science can be understood predominantly as a handmaiden of imperialism. Instead, it argues that the myriad colonial sciences had ideological and interventionist traditions distinct from each other and from the colonial bureaucracy and that these tensions better explain environmental politics and policy dilemmas in the post-colonial era.

Professor Rajan argues that tropical forestry in the nineteenth century consisted of at least two distinct approaches towards nature, resource, and people; and what won out in the end was the Continental European forestry paradigm. Rajan also shows that science and scientists were relatively marginal until the First World War. It was the acute scientific and resource crisis felt during the War, along with the rise of experts and expertise in Britain during that period and the lobby-politics of an organized empire-wide scientific community, that resulted in resource management regimes such as forestry beginning to get serious state backing. Over time, considerable differences in approach and outlook towards policy emerged between different colonial scientific communities, such as foresters and agriculturists. These different colonial sciences represented different situated knowledges, with different visions of nature, people, and empire, and in different configurations of power.

Finally, in a panoramic overview of post-colonial developments, Rajan argues that the hegemony of these state-scientific regimes of resource-management during the period 1950-1990 engendered not just social revolt, as recent historical work has shown, but also intellectual protest. Consequently, the discipline of forestry became systematically re-conceptualized, with newapproaches to sylviculture, economics, law, and crucially, with new visions of modernity. This disciplinary change constitutes nothing short of a cognitive revolution, one that has been brought about by a clearly articulated political perspective on the orientation of the discipline of forestry by its practitioners.”