Climate Stewardship

$19.95

As climate disruption intensifies the world over, Californians are finding solutions across a diversity of communities and landscapes.

Though climate change is a global existential threat, we cannot wait for nation-states to solve the problem when there are actions we can take now to protect our own communities. In Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California, readers are invited on a journey to discover that all life is interconnected and shaped by climate and to learn how communities can help tackle climate change.

Climate Stewardship shares stories from everyday people and shows how their actions enhance the resilience of communities and ecosystems across ten distinct bioregions. Climate science that justifies these actions is woven throughout, making it easy to learn about Earth's complex systems. The authors interpret and communicate these stories in a way that is enjoyable, inspiring, and even amusing.

California is uniquely positioned to develop and implement novel solutions to widespread climate challenges, owing to the state's remarkable biogeographic diversity and robust public science programs. Produced in collaboration with the UC California Naturalist Program, Climate Stewardship focuses on regenerative approaches to energy, agriculture, and land and water use across forested, agricultural, and urban landscapes. The authors' hopeful and encouraging tone aims to help readers develop a sense that they, too, can act now to make meaningful change in their communities.

Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins

$29.95

A geneticist and internationally recognized anti-racism educator provides a powerful, science-based rebuttal to common fallacies about human difference.

Well-meaning physicians, parents, and even scientists today often spread misinformation about what biology can and can’t tell us about our bodies, minds, and identities. In this accessible, myth-busting book, geneticist Shoumita Dasgupta draws on the latest science to correct common misconceptions about how much of our social identities are actually based in genetics.

Dasgupta weaves together history, current affairs, and cutting-edge science to break down how genetic concepts are misused and how we can approach scientific evidence in a socially responsible way. With a unifying and intersectional approach disentangling biology from bigotry, the book moves beyond race and gender to incorporate categories like sexual orientation, disability, and class. Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins is an invaluable, empowering resource for biologists, geneticists, science educators, and anyone working against bias in their community.

Science v. Story

$29.95

Uncovering common threads across types of science skepticism to show why these controversial narratives stick and how we can more effectively counter them through storytelling

Science v. Story analyzes four scientific controversies—climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19—through the lens of storytelling. Instead of viewing stories as adversaries to scientific practices, Emma Frances Bloomfield demonstrates how storytelling is integral to science communication. Drawing from narrative theory and rhetorical studies, Science v. Story examines scientific stories and rival stories, including disingenuous rival stories that undermine scientific conclusions and productive rival stories that work to make science more inclusive.

Science v. Story offers two tools to evaluate and build stories: narrative webs and narrative constellations. These visual mapping tools chart the features of a story (i.e., characters, action, sequence, scope, storyteller, and content) to locate opportunities for audience engagement. Bloomfield ultimately argues that we can strengthen science communication by incorporating storytelling in critical ways that are attentive to audience and context.

Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question

$19.95

The first book-length exploration of climate-driven reproductive anxiety that places race and social justice at the center.

Eco-anxiety. Climate guilt. Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Solastalgia. The study of environmental emotions and related mental health impacts is a rapidly growing field, but most researchers overlook a closely related concern: reproductive anxiety. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question is the first comprehensive study of how environmental emotions influence whether, when, and why people today decide to become parents—or not.

Jade S. Sasser argues that we can and should continue to create the families we desire, but that doing so equitably will require deep commitments to social, reproductive, and climate justice. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question presents original research, drawing from in-depth interviews and national survey results that analyze the role of race in environmental emotions and the reproductive plans young people are making as a result. Sasser concludes that climate emotions and climate justice are inseparable, and that culturally appropriate mental and emotional health services are a necessary component to ensure climate justice for vulnerable communities.

Nature's Greatest Success

$29.95

The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force—and the science behind it.

Domesticated crops were not human creations, and agriculture was not simply invented. As Robert N. Spengler shows, domestication was the result of an evolutionary process in which people played a role only unwittingly and as actors in a numberless cast that spanned the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature's Greatest Success is the first book to bring together recent scientific discoveries and fascinating ongoing research to provide a systematic account of not only how agriculture really developed but why.

Through fifteen chapters, this book dives deep into the complex processes that drove domestication and the various roles that plants and animals, including humans, played in bringing about those changes. At the intersection of popular history, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, Nature's Greatest Success offers a revolutionary account of humanity not at the apex of nature but deeply embedded in the natural world and the evolutionary processes that continue to guide it even today.

The Jepson Manual

$150.00

The second edition of The Jepson Manual thoroughly updates this acclaimed work, the single most comprehensive resource on California's amazingly diverse flora. Integrating the latest science with the results of intensive fieldwork, institutional collaboration, and the efforts of hundreds of contributing authors, this new edition is an essential reference on California's native and naturalized vascular plants.

This edition includes treatments of many newly described or discovered taxa and recently introduced plants, and it reflects major improvements in plant taxonomy. Nearly two-thirds of the 7,600 species, subspecies, and varieties that the volume describes are now illustrated with diagnostic drawings. Geographic distributions, elevation ranges, flowering times, nomenclature, and the status of non-natives and native taxa of special concern have all been updated throughout. The second edition also allows for identification of 240 alien taxa that are not fully naturalized and features a new chapter on geologic, climatic, and vegetation history of California.

The Neck

$26.95

A 300-million-year tour of the prominent role of the neck in animal evolution and human culture.

Humans give a lot of attention to the neck. We decorate it with jewelry and ties, kiss it passionately, and use it to express ourselves in word and song. Yet, at the neck, people have also shackled their prisoners, executed their opponents, and slain their victims. Beyond the drama of human culture, animals have evolved their necks into a staggering variety of shapes and uses vital to their lifestyles. The Neck delves into evolutionary time to solve a living paradox—why is our neck so central to our survival and culture, but so vulnerable to injury and disease?

Biologist Kent Dunlap shows how the neck's vulnerability is not simply an unfortunate quirk of evolution. Its weaknesses are intimately connected to the vessels, pipes, and glands that make it so vital to existence. Fun and far-reaching, The Neck explores the diversity of forms and functions of the neck in humans and other animals and shows how this small anatomical transition zone has been a locus of incredible evolutionary and cultural creativity.

A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety

$16.95

Gen Z's first "existential toolkit" for combating eco-guilt and burnout while advocating for climate justice.

A youth movement is reenergizing global environmental activism. The “climate generation”—late millennials and iGen, or Generation Z—is demanding that policy makers and government leaders take immediate action to address the dire outcomes predicted by climate science. Those inheriting our planet’s environmental problems expect to encounter challenges, but they may not have the skills to grapple with the feelings of powerlessness and despair that may arise when they confront this seemingly intractable situation.

Drawing on a decade of experience leading and teaching in college environmental studies programs, Sarah Jaquette Ray has created an “existential tool kit” for the climate generation. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, social movements, mindfulness, and the environmental humanities, Ray explains why and how we need to let go of eco-guilt, resist burnout, and cultivate resilience while advocating for climate justice. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety is the essential guidebook for the climate generation—and perhaps the rest of us—as we confront the greatest environmental threat of our time.

Replumbing the City

$29.95

Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply, but climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos—including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents—are developing new water supplies within the space of the city. Sayd Randle’s ethnography examines the labor of replumbing LA’s sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management. Tracking how such projects redistribute the work of water management, the book explores thorny questions of how the labor of climate adaptation should be mobilized and valued.

Food Chemistry in Small Bites

$39.95

Food Chemistry in Small Bites takes readers on an up-close scientific journey through the transformation of food when meals are prepared. Organized in bite-size, digestible units, this innovative text introduces students to food's molecular makeup as well as the perception of food by the five senses. Using familiar foods as examples, it explores what happens to ingredients when heated, cooled, or treated and also considers what happens when materials that don’t naturally mix are forced to do so.

With informative, full-color renderings and a hands-on lab section, the book encourages students to think like scientists while preparing delicious dishes. Readers will formulate hypotheses as to why certain foods taste hot despite being at room temperature, why milk separates into curds and whey when lemon is added, and other ordinary but chemically complex phenomena. This book also importantly challenges readers to think critically about the future of food in the face of a warming planet.

Cover image for Food Chemistry in Small Bites, isbn: 9780520397637

California Catastrophes

$26.95

This comprehensive account of California’s numerous and perilous natural disasters explores how a unique combination of forces has affected Californians throughout the state's history and carries a sobering message about our short disaster memories.

California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns and regions frequently contend with destruction caused by earthquakes, floods, landslides and debris flows, and sea-level rise and coastal erosion. As Gary Griggs demonstrates in California Catastrophes, few years go by without a disaster of some kind, and residents often rebuild in the same locations that were just destroyed.

Considering the current climate crisis and increasing environmental inequalities, the stakes are growing ever higher. This book dives into the history of the state’s vulnerability to natural hazards, why and where these events occur, and how Californians can better prepare going forward. A mix of photographs and maps both historical and contemporary orients readers within the state’s sprawling landscapes and provides glimpses of some of the geologic risks in each region. With the final chapter, Griggs issues a call to action and challenges readers to envision a safer, more equitable, and sustainable future.

Climate Stewardship

$19.95

As climate disruption intensifies the world over, Californians are finding solutions across a diversity of communities and landscapes.

Though climate change is a global existential threat, we cannot wait for nation-states to solve the problem when there are actions we can take now to protect our own communities. In Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California, readers are invited on a journey to discover that all life is interconnected and shaped by climate and to learn how communities can help tackle climate change.

Climate Stewardship shares stories from everyday people and shows how their actions enhance the resilience of communities and ecosystems across ten distinct bioregions. Climate science that justifies these actions is woven throughout, making it easy to learn about Earth's complex systems. The authors interpret and communicate these stories in a way that is enjoyable, inspiring, and even amusing.

California is uniquely positioned to develop and implement novel solutions to widespread climate challenges, owing to the state's remarkable biogeographic diversity and robust public science programs. Produced in collaboration with the UC California Naturalist Program, Climate Stewardship focuses on regenerative approaches to energy, agriculture, and land and water use across forested, agricultural, and urban landscapes. The authors' hopeful and encouraging tone aims to help readers develop a sense that they, too, can act now to make meaningful change in their communities.

Cover image for Climate Stewardship, isbn: 9780520976450

Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta uses the story of mud to answer a deceptively simple question: How can a place uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise be one of the nation's most promiscuous producers and consumers of fossil fuels? Organized around New Orleans and South Louisiana as a case study, this book examines how the unruly Mississippi River and its muddy delta shaped the people, culture, and governance of the region. It proposes a framework of "muddy thinking" to gum the wheels of extractive capitalism and pollution that have brought us to the precipice of planetary collapse. Muddy Thinking calls upon our dirty, shared histories to address urgent questions of mutual survival and care in a rapidly changing world.

Science in Resistance

$24.95

Scientists around the world rise up for climate and ecological justice

In April 2022, hundreds of scientists rose in civil disobedience, breaking the law in more than twenty-eight countries. Risking arrest, they glued their hands to roads, blocked government and corporate buildings, and chained themselves to the White House fence. In Science in Resistance, Fernando Racimo provides a first-person account of the Scientist Rebellion, a growing international movement of researchers stepping beyond conventional roles to alert the public about the need for action in the climate emergency. Combining personal stories, interviews with frontline activists, and insights from research on direct action and academia, he explores the challenges scientists face when taking a stand for climate and social justice.

Reflecting on his role as a scientist-activist, Racimo describes how he came to be involved in the movement. He also explores the many ways in which academic institutions today are complicit in climate breakdown—whether by accepting funding from and collaborating with the very industries driving it, or by discouraging scientists from speaking up. Drawing on lessons from political science, psychology, ecology, sociology, and the history of science, this inspiring book shows how we can all take a stand for climate justice, by collectively organizing for change.

Cover image for Science in Resistance, isbn: 9780520420342

Evolution's Rainbow

$34.95

In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science—and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality.

Roughgarden argues that principal elements of Darwinian sexual selection theory are false and suggests a new theory that emphasizes social inclusion and control of access to resources and mating opportunity. She disputes a range of scientific and medical concepts, including Wilson's genetic determinism of behavior, evolutionary psychology, the existence of a gay gene, the role of parenting in determining gender identity, and Dawkins's "selfish gene" as the driver of natural selection. She dares social science to respect the agency and rationality of diverse people; shows that many cultures across the world and throughout history accommodate people we label today as lesbian, gay, and transgendered; and calls on the Christian religion to acknowledge the Bible's many passages endorsing diversity in gender and sexuality. Evolution's Rainbow concludes with bold recommendations for improving education in biology, psychology, and medicine; for democratizing genetic engineering and medical practice; and for building a public monument to affirm diversity as one of our nation's defining principles.

Governing Climate

$29.95

After decades of debate about global warming, the fact of the climate crisis is finally widely accepted. People at all scales—from the household to the global market—are attempting to govern climate to deal with its causes and impacts. Although the stakes are different now, governing climate is centuries old. In this book, Zeke Baker develops a genealogy of climate science that traces the relationship between those who have created knowledge of the climate and those who have attempted to gain power and govern society, right up to the present, historic moment. Baker draws together over two centuries of science, politics, and environmental change to demonstrate the "co-production" of climate knowledge and power-seeking activity, with a focus on the United States. This book provides a fresh account of contemporary issues transecting science and climate politics, specifically the rise of "climate security," and examines how climate science can either facilitate or reconcile the unequal distribution of power and resources.

The Mountains That Remade America

$26.95

From ski towns to national parks, fresh fruit to environmental lawsuits, the Sierra Nevada has changed the way Americans live. Whether and where there was gold to be mined redefined land, mineral, and water laws. Where rain falls (and where it doesn’t) determines whose fruit grows on trees and whose appears on slot machines. All this emerges from the geology of the range and how it changed history, and in so doing, changed the country.

The Mountains That Remade America combines geology with history to show how the particular forces and conditions that created the Sierra Nevada have effected broad outcomes and influenced daily life in the United States in the past and how they continue to do so today. Drawing connections between events in historical geology and contemporary society, Craig H. Jones makes geological science accessible and shows the vast impact this mountain range has had on the American West.

Fire in California's Ecosystems

$120.00

Fire in California’s Ecosystems describes fire in detail—both as an integral natural process in the California landscape and as a growing threat to urban and suburban developments in the state. Written by many of the foremost authorities on the subject, this comprehensive volume is an ideal authoritative reference tool and the foremost synthesis of knowledge on the science, ecology, and management of fire in California. Part One introduces the basics of fire ecology, including overviews of historical fires, vegetation, climate, weather, fire as a physical and ecological process, and fire regimes, and reviews the interactions between fire and the physical, plant, and animal components of the environment. Part Two explores the history and ecology of fire in each of California's nine bioregions. Part Three examines fire management in California during Native American and post-Euro-American settlement and also current issues related to fire policy such as fuel management, watershed management, air quality, invasive plant species, at-risk species, climate change, social dynamics, and the future of fire management. This edition includes critical scientific and management updates and four new chapters on fire weather, fire regimes, climate change, and social dynamics.

Field Guide to Animal Tracks and Scat of California

$36.95

Spotting an animal’s fresh footprints in the wild can conjure a world for the hiker: Why did the deer tracks disappear? Where did the cougar turn off the trail? What does it mean when two sets of footprints seem to coincide? This beautifully illustrated field guide, the first devoted to the tracks and signs of California animals—including birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates like spiders and beetles—blends meticulous science with field experience to provide an engaging companion for both armchair exploration and easy field identification. Filled with useful tools for the wildlife expert, and essential background and visual aids for the novice, including in-depth information about the ecology of each species, this book goes beyond basic recognition of types to interpret what animals leave behind as a way of “seeing” how they move through the world.

Field Guide to Animal Tracks and Scat of California

Worlds of Gray and Green

$29.95

The Anthropocene has arrived riding a wave of pollution. From "forever chemicals" to oceanic garbage patches, human-made chemical compounds are seemingly everywhere. Concerned about how these compounds disrupt multiple lives and ecologies, environmental scholars, activists, and affected communities have sought to curb the causes of pollution, focusing especially on the extractive industries. In Worlds of Gray and Green, authors Sebastián Ureta and Patricio Flores challenge us to rethink extraction as ecological practice. Adopting an environmental humanities analytic lens, Ureta and Flores offer a rich ethnographic exploration of the waste produced by Chile's El Teniente, the world's largest underground mine. Deposited in a massive dam, the waste—known as tailings—engages with human and non-human entities in multiple ways through a process the authors call geosymbiosis. Some of these geosymbioses result in toxicity and damage, while others become the basis of lively novel ecologies. A particular kind of power emerges in the process, one that is radically indifferent to human beings but that affects them in many ways. Learning to live with geosymbioses offers a tentative path forward amid ongoing environmental devastation.

Moths of Western North America

$100.00

Insects boast incredible diversity, and this book treats an important component of the western insect biota that has not been summarized before—moths and their plant relationships. There are about 8,000 named species of moths in our region, and although most are unnoticed by the public, many attract attention when their larvae create economic damage: eating holes in woolens, infesting stored foods, boring into apples, damaging crops and garden plants, or defoliating forests. In contrast to previous North American moth books, this volume discusses and illustrates about 25% of the species in every family, including the tiny species, making this the most comprehensive volume in its field. With this approach it provides access to microlepidoptera study for biologists as well as amateur collectors. About 2,500 species are described and illustrated, including virtually all moths of economic importance, summarizing their morphology, taxonomy, adult behavior, larval biology, and life cycles.

Food Chemistry in Small Bites

$95.00

Food Chemistry in Small Bites takes readers on an up-close scientific journey through the transformation of food when meals are prepared. Organized in bite-size, digestible units, this innovative text introduces students to food's molecular makeup as well as the perception of food by the five senses. Using familiar foods as examples, it explores what happens to ingredients when heated, cooled, or treated and also considers what happens when materials that don’t naturally mix are forced to do so.

With informative, full-color renderings and a hands-on lab section, the book encourages students to think like scientists while preparing delicious dishes. Readers will formulate hypotheses as to why certain foods taste hot despite being at room temperature, why milk separates into curds and whey when lemon is added, and other ordinary but chemically complex phenomena. This book also importantly challenges readers to think critically about the future of food in the face of a warming planet.

Cover image for Food Chemistry in Small Bites, isbn: 9780520397620

Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region

$39.95

This is the definitive botanic guide to the wetlands, woodlands, coastlines, hills, and valleys of the beautiful and diverse San Francisco Bay Region. For this extensively revised and redesigned third edition of Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region, the identification keys have been thoroughly updated to include 21 new families, 155 new species, and approximately 330 changes in the scientific names, ensuring that this popular book will continue to be the most comprehensive and authoritative identification guide to the region’s native and introduced plants.

• Easy-to-use keys describe more than 2,000 species of wild flowers, trees, shrubs, ferns, and weeds.
• Hundreds of line drawings and color photographs support accurate identification.
• Plants are identified by both common and scientific names, making this guide an essential resource for amateur naturalists, students, and professionals.

The Paradox of Preservation

$26.95

Point Reyes National Seashore has a long history as a working landscape, with dairy and beef ranching, fishing, and oyster farming; yet, since 1962 it has also been managed as a National Seashore. The Paradox of Preservation chronicles how national ideals about what a park “ought to be” have developed over time and what happens when these ideals are implemented by the National Park Service (NPS) in its efforts to preserve places that are also lived-in landscapes. Using the conflict surrounding the closure of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, Laura Alice Watt examines how NPS management policies and processes for land use and protection do not always reflect the needs and values of local residents. Instead, the resulting landscapes produced by the NPS represent a series of compromises between use and protection—and between the area’s historic pastoral character and a newer vision of wilderness. A fascinating and deeply researched book, The Paradox of Preservation will appeal to those studying environmental history, conservation, public lands, and cultural landscape management, and to those looking to learn more about the history of this dynamic California coastal region.

Terrestrial Vegetation of California, 3rd Edition

$100.00

This thoroughly revised, entirely rewritten edition of what is the essential reference on California’s diverse and ever-changing vegetation now brings readers the most authoritative, state-of-the-art view of California’s plant ecosystems available. Integrating decades of research, leading community ecologists and field botanists describe and classify California’s vegetation types, identify environmental factors that determine the distribution of vegetation types, analyze the role of disturbance regimes in vegetation dynamics, chronicle change due to human activities, identify conservation issues, describe restoration strategies, and prioritize directions for new research. Several new chapters address statewide issues such as the historic appearance and impact of introduced and invasive plants, the soils of California, and more.

Terrestrial Vegetation of California, 3rd Edition

Art-Science Undisciplined

$22.95

A guide to mutually transformative collaboration between artists and scientists.

Art-Science Undisciplined invites us into a collaborative journey grounded in mutual exploration and transformation. Moving beyond transactional exchanges of expertise, artist Janani Balasubramanian and astrophysicist Natalie Gosnell draw on their own experiences, as well as stories from other art-science collaborators, to offer an imaginative guide for developing a values-based and joyful undisciplined practice.

This playbook offers practical and conceptual tools for co-creation that foster new, powerful alliances between artists, scientists, and their supporters. While attentive to the everyday reality of busy schedules and institutional demands, Balasubramanian and Gosnell illuminate strategies to change our current ways of working and dare us to imagine a more expansive future. The projects, potentials, and possibilities resulting from undisciplined creation will change not only the practitioners but their worlds altogether.

Cover image for Art-Science Undisciplined, isbn: 9780520405547

Andean Meltdown

$29.95

Andean Meltdown examines how climate change and its consequences for Peru's glaciers are affecting the country's water supply and impacting Andean society and culture in unprecedented ways. Drawing on forty years of extensive research, relationship building, and community engagement in Peru, Karsten Paerregaard provides an ethnographic exploration of Andean ritual practices and performances in the context of an altered climate. By documenting Andean peoples' responses to rapid glacier retreat and urgent water shortages, Paerregaard considers the myriad ways climate change intersects with environmental, social, and political change. A pathbreaking contribution to cultural anthropology and environmental humanities, Andean Meltdown challenges prevailing theoretical thinking about the culture-nature nexus and offers a new perspective on Andean peoples' understanding of their role as agents in the shifting relationship between humans and nonhumans.

Arizona Flora

$85.00

Nearly every life form found among North American flowering plants is represented in Arizona. This amazing diversity is partly explained by the fact that the altitudinal range extends from a few feet above sea level to approximately 12,000 feet at the summit of the San Francisco Peaks. The life zone range from Arctic-Alpine on these peaks to Lower Sonoran in the southwest and Subtropical in the extreme south.

The main objective of this book is to provide means for identifying the approximately 3438 species of flowering plants, ferns, and fern-allies growing without cultivation in Arizona.

Keys for identification of the families, genera, and species are provided. Under each species the authors give the geographical distribution within and outside Arizona, and usually the altitudinal range and time of flowering. They describe economic uses, toxic or other properties, and ornamental value of many plants, giving particular attention to the utilization of native plants by the large Indian population of the state.

Introductory chapters describe the topography, geology, soils, and climate of Arizona, the several types of vegetation in relation to the physical conditions, and the proportional representation of the larger plant families. There is also a brief account of botanical explorations in Arizona since 1832.

This is the only available work on the flora of Arizona that includes the results of intensive, botanical research in the state during the past twenty years. It is based on an earlier publication, Flowering Plants and Ferns of Arizona, issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1942 and now out of print. For the present revision, a supplementary section of more than fifty pages has been prepared under the direction of John Thomas Howell and Elizabeth McClintock of the California Academy of Sciences.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1960.

Field Guide to Birds of the Northern California Coast

$24.95

The Northern California coast--from Monterey County to the Oregon border--is home to some of the richest avian habitats on the North American continent. Field Guide to Birds of the Northern California Coast provides a comprehensive ecological overview of this extensive and diverse region. It features detailed discussions of the area's most common waterbirds, raptors, and landbirds and highlights the most productive birding sites in each Northern California coastal county.

Accessibly written and user-friendly, this guide contains nearly 250 species accounts that focus on seasonal rhythms and behavioral characteristics of each species. More than 130 color photographs and hand-drawn sketches depict the birds in context, and maps and occurrence charts indicate when readers might spot each species.

Field Guide to Birds of the Northern California Coast

Cannabis

$49.95

Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of the natural origins and early evolution of this famous plant, highlighting its historic role in the development of human societies. Cannabis has long been prized for the strong and durable fiber in its stalks, its edible and oil-rich seeds, and the psychoactive and medicinal compounds produced by its female flowers. The culturally valuable and often irreplaceable goods derived from cannabis deeply influenced the commercial, medical, ritual, and religious practices of cultures throughout the ages, and human desire for these commodities directed the evolution of the plant toward its contemporary varieties. As interest in cannabis grows and public debate over its many uses rises, this book will help us understand why humanity continues to rely on this plant and adapts it to suit our needs.

The Jepson Desert Manual

$57.95

In the spirit of the avid desert botanist Willis Linn Jepson, The Jepson Desert Manual provides botanical enthusiasts of all backgrounds with the first comprehensive field guide focused exclusively on native and naturalized vascular plants of California's southeastern deserts. Based on The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California, the Desert Manual incorporates new illustrations for more than two hundred desert taxa, revised keys to identification, updated distributional information, and 128 color photographs. This guide will allow easier identification of California's fascinating desert plants than would be possible in a manual with broader geographic coverage.

As in The Jepson Manual, detailed descriptions and illustrations of plant characteristics are provided, along with information on native versus alien status, habitats, elevation, endangerment, toxicity, weed status, horticultural requirements, and flowering times. Introductory sections on the desert setting and vegetation offer the reader a broad context and new perspectives for appreciating the more than twenty five hundred plant species included in the Manual. For amateur and professional botanists alike, the Desert Manual will prove to be an invaluable companion in California's spectacular Mojave Desert, Sonoran Desert, and southern Great Basin environments, including the White Mountains.

Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region

$19.95

Possibly no comparable area on earth displays as many varieties of weather simultaneously as the San Francisco Bay Region. Harold Gilliam explains the atmospheric forces and geologic formations that come together in this region's unique confluence of wind, river, ocean, bay, and hills. The fully revised and updated edition of this best-selling book incorporates the latest scientific information--much of it gathered from satellite technology--that has greatly improved our understanding of the weather in the years since the book was first published. Writing in a delightfully engaging style, Gilliam provides the tools necessary for understanding the grand show of nature that takes place around the San Francisco Bay--from Napa Valley in the north to San Jose in the south.

Using nontechnical language to define weather terms and the general principles needed to understand weather patterns, Gilliam explains such phenomena as the jet stream, the famous summer fog that pours over the Golden Gate Bridge, and the often dangerous winter tule fog. This edition also includes a discussion of the planetary influences that may cause long-term changes in the local climate: Gilliam explains the "greenhouse effect" and what global warming could mean for the San Francisco Bay Area, looks at the local effects of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena, and considers the thinning of the ozone layer.

This fascinating book, enhanced with informative maps, diagrams, and color illustrations, is liberally sprinkled with references to Bay Area neighborhoods and geographic features, giving the book a lively sense of local color.

Art-Science Undisciplined

$95.00

A guide to mutually transformative collaboration between artists and scientists.

Art-Science Undisciplined invites us into a collaborative journey grounded in mutual exploration and transformation. Moving beyond transactional exchanges of expertise, artist Janani Balasubramanian and astrophysicist Natalie Gosnell draw on their own experiences, as well as stories from other art-science collaborators, to offer an imaginative guide for developing a values-based and joyful undisciplined practice.

This playbook offers practical and conceptual tools for co-creation that foster new, powerful alliances between artists, scientists, and their supporters. While attentive to the everyday reality of busy schedules and institutional demands, Balasubramanian and Gosnell illuminate strategies to change our current ways of working and dare us to imagine a more expansive future. The projects, potentials, and possibilities resulting from undisciplined creation will change not only the practitioners but their worlds altogether.

Cover image for Art-Science Undisciplined, isbn: 9780520405530

Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins

$29.95

A geneticist and internationally recognized anti-racism educator provides a powerful, science-based rebuttal to common fallacies about human difference.

Well-meaning physicians, parents, and even scientists today often spread misinformation about what biology can and can’t tell us about our bodies, minds, and identities. In this accessible, myth-busting book, geneticist Shoumita Dasgupta draws on the latest science to correct common misconceptions about how much of our social identities are actually based in genetics.

Dasgupta weaves together history, current affairs, and cutting-edge science to break down how genetic concepts are misused and how we can approach scientific evidence in a socially responsible way. With a unifying and intersectional approach disentangling biology from bigotry, the book moves beyond race and gender to incorporate categories like sexual orientation, disability, and class. Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins is an invaluable, empowering resource for biologists, geneticists, science educators, and anyone working against bias in their community.

Cover image for Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins, isbn: 9780520397163

Encoding Bioethics

$29.95

Encoding Bioethics addresses important ethical concerns from the perspective of each of the stakeholders who will develop, deploy, and use artificial intelligence systems to support clinical decisions. Utilizing an applied ethical model of patient-centered care, this book considers the viewpoints of programmers, health system and health insurance leaders, clinicians, and patients when AI is used in clinical decision-making. The authors build on their respective experiences as a surgeon-bioethicist and a surgeon–AI developer to give the reader an accessible account of the relevant ethical considerations raised when AI systems are introduced into the physician-patient relationship.

Energy Islands

$29.95

Energy Islands provides an urgent and nuanced portrait of collective action that resists racial capitalism, colonialism, and climate disruption. Weaving together historical and ethnographic research, this story challenges the master narratives of Puerto Rico as a tourist destination and site of "natural" disasters to demonstrate how fossil fuel economies are inextricably entwined with colonial practices and how local community groups in Puerto Rico have struggled against energy coloniality to mobilize and transform power from the ground up.

Catalina M. de Onís documents how these groups work to decenter continental contexts and deconstruct damaging hierarchies that devalue and exploit rural coastal communities. She highlights and collaborates with individuals who refuse the cruel logics of empire by imagining and implementing energy justice and other interconnected radical power transformations. Diving deeply into energy, islands, and power, this book engages various metaphors for alternative world-making.

Thoreau and the Language of Trees

$24.95

Trees were central to Henry David Thoreau’s creativity as a writer, his work as a naturalist, his thought, and his inner life. His portraits of them were so perfect, it was as if he could see the sap flowing beneath their bark. When Thoreau wrote that the poet loves the pine tree as his own shadow in the air, he was speaking about himself. In short, he spoke their language.

In this original book, Richard Higgins explores Thoreau’s deep connections to trees: his keen perception of them, the joy they gave him, the poetry he saw in them, his philosophical view of them, and how they fed his soul. His lively essays show that trees were a thread connecting all parts of Thoreau’s being—heart, mind, and spirit. Included are one hundred excerpts from Thoreau’s writings about trees, paired with over sixty of the author’s photographs. Thoreau’s words are as vivid now as they were in 1890, when an English naturalist wrote that he was unusually able to “to preserve the flashing forest colors in unfading light.” Thoreau and the Language of Trees shows that Thoreau, with uncanny foresight, believed trees were essential to the preservation of the world.

A Natural History of California

$44.95

In this comprehensive and abundantly illustrated book, Allan A. Schoenherr describes the natural history of California—a state with a greater range of landforms, a greater variety of habitats, and more kinds of plants and animals than any area of equivalent size in all of North America. A Natural History of California focuses on each distinctive region, addressing its climate, rocks, soil, plants, and animals.

The second edition of this classic work features updated species names and taxa, new details about parks reclassified by federal and state agencies, new stories about modern human and animal interaction, and a new epilogue on the impacts of climate change.

The Turtles of Mexico

$125.00

The Turtles of Mexico is the first comprehensive guide to the biology, ecology, evolution, and distribution of more than fifty freshwater and terrestrial turtle taxa found in Mexico. Legler and Vogt draw on more than fifty years of fieldwork to elucidate the natural history of these species. The volume includes an extensive introduction to turtle anatomy, taxonomy, phylogeny, biogeography, and physiology. A key to the turtles of Mexico is included along with individual species accounts featuring geographic distribution maps and detailed color illustrations. Specific topics discussed for each species include habitat, diet, feeding behavior, reproduction, predators, parasites, growth and ontogeny, sexual dimorphism, growth rings, economic use, conservation, legal protection, and taxonomic studies.

This book is a complete reference for scientists, conservationists, and professional and amateur enthusiasts who wish to study Mexican turtles.

A Sea of Glass

$24.95

"The author makes an eloquent plea for marine biodiversity conservation."—Library Journal

"Harvell seems to channel the devotion that motivated the Blaschkas."—The Guardian

Winner of the 2016 National Outdoor Book Award, Environment Category

It started with a glass octopus. Dusty, broken, and all but forgotten, it caught Drew Harvell’s eye. Fashioned in intricate detail by the father-son glassmaking team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the octopus belonged to a menagerie of unusual marine creatures that had been packed away for decades in a storage unit. More than 150 years earlier, the Blaschkas had been captivated by marine invertebrates and spun their likenesses into glass, documenting the life of oceans untouched by climate change and human impacts. Inspired by the Blaschkas’ uncanny replicas, Harvell set out in search of their living counterparts. In A Sea of Glass, she recounts this journey of a lifetime, taking readers along as she dives beneath the ocean's surface to a rarely seen world, revealing the surprising and unusual biology of some of the most ancient animals on the tree of life. On the way, we glimpse a century of change in our ocean ecosystems and learn which of the living matches for the Blaschkas’ creations are, indeed, as fragile as glass.

Drew Harvell and the Blaschka menagerie are the subjects of the documentary Fragile Legacy, which won the Best Short Film award at the 2015 Blue Ocean Film Festival & Conservation Summit. Learn more about the film and check out the trailer here.

The Principia: The Authoritative Translation and Guide

$34.95

In his monumental 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as the Principia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles.

This authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms.

Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the Principia also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system.

The illuminating Guide to Newton's Principia by I. Bernard Cohen makes this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.

The Principia: The Authoritative Translation and Guide

Tracks and Shadows

$18.95

Intellectually rich, intensely personal, and beautifully written, Tracks and Shadows is both an absorbing autobiography of a celebrated field biologist and a celebration of beauty in nature. Harry W. Greene, award-winning author of Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature, delves into the poetry of field biology, showing how nature eases our existential quandaries. More than a memoir, the book is about the wonder of snakes, the beauty of studying and understanding natural history, and the importance of sharing the love of nature with humanity.

Greene begins with his youthful curiosity about the natural world and moves to his stints as a mortician's assistant, ambulance driver, and army medic. In detailing his academic career, he describes how his work led him to believe that nature’s most profound lessons lurk in hard-won details. He discusses the nuts and bolts of field research and teaching, contrasts the emotional impact of hot dry habitats with hot wet ones, imparts the basics of snake biology, and introduces the great explorers Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He reflects on friendship and happiness, tackles notions like anthropomorphism and wilderness, and argues that organisms remain the core of biology, science plays key roles in conservation, and natural history offers an enlightened form of contentment.

The Light and Smith Manual

$100.00

The Fourth Edition of The Light and Smith Manual continues a sixty-five-year tradition of providing to both students and professionals an indispensable, comprehensive, and authoritative guide to Pacific coast marine invertebrates of coastal waters, rocky shores, sandy beaches, tidal mud flats, salt marshes, and floats and docks. This classic and unparalleled reference has been newly expanded to include all common and many rare species from Point Conception, California, to the Columbia River, one of the most studied areas in the world for marine invertebrates. In addition, although focused on the central and northern California and Oregon coasts, this encyclopedic source is useful for anyone working in North American coastal ecosystems, from Alaska to Mexico.

More than one hundred scholars have provided new keys, illustrations, and annotated species lists for over 3,500 species of intertidal and many shallow water marine organisms ranging from protozoans to sea squirts. This expanded volume covers sponges, sea anemones, hydroids, jellyfish, flatworms, polychaetes, amphipods, crabs, insects, snails, clams, chitons, and scores of other important groups. The Fourth Edition also features introductory chapters on marine habitats and biogeography, interstitial marine life, and intertidal parasites, as well as expanded treatments of common planktonic organisms likely to be encountered in near-to-shore shallow waters.

Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions

$23.95

The California Tortoiseshell, West Coast Lady, Red Admiral, and Golden Oak Hairstreak are just a few of the many butterfly species found in the floristically rich San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley regions. This guide, written for both beginning and experienced butterfly watchers by one of the nation’s best-known professional lepidopterists, provides thorough, up-to-date information on all of the butterfly species found in this diverse and accessible region. Written in lively prose, it discusses the natural history and conservation status for these butterflies and at the same time provides an integrated view of butterfly biology based on studies conducted in northern California and around the world. Compact enough for use in the field, the guide also includes tips on butterfly watching, photography, gardening, and more.

* Discusses and identifies more than 130 species

* Species accounts include information on identifying butterflies through behavior, markings, and host plants

* Beautiful full-color plates illustrate top and bottom views of wings for easier identification

* Includes a species checklist and a glossary

Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions

Geology of the Sierra Nevada

$26.95

Writing with verve and clarity, Mary Hill tells the story of the magnificent Sierra Nevada—the longest, highest, and most spectacular mountain range in the contiguous United States. Hill takes us from the time before the land which would be California even existed, through the days of roaring volcanoes, violent earthquakes, and chilling ice sheets, to the more recent history of the Sierra's early explorers and the generations of adventuresome souls who followed.

The author introduces the rocks of the Sierra Nevada, which tell the mountains' tale, and explains how nature's forces, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, faulting, erosion, and glaciation formed the range's world-renowned scenery and mineral wealth, including gold.

For thirty years, the first edition of Geology of the Sierra Nevada has been the definitive guide to the Sierra Nevada's geological history for nature lovers, travelers, hikers, campers, and armchair explorers. This new edition offers new chapters and sidebars and incorporates the concept of plate tectonics throughout the text.

* Written in easy-to-understand language for a wide audience.

* Gives detailed information on where to view outstanding Sierra Nevada geology in some of the world's most beloved natural treasures and national parks, including Yosemite.

* Provides specific information on places to see glaciers and glacial deposits, caves, and exhibits of gold mines and mining equipment, many from Gold Rush times.

* Superbly illustrated with 117 new color illustrations, 16 halftones, 39 line illustrations, and 12 maps, and also features an easy-to-use, interactive key for identifying rocks and a glossary of geological terms.

Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America

$26.95

* Features detailed species accounts; gives information on horned lizard biology, ecology, and evolution; and describes the role of these fascinating reptiles in mythology, culture, and art

* Covers the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and includes all species of horned lizards

Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America

Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region

$39.95

This is the definitive botanic guide to the wetlands, woodlands, coastlines, hills, and valleys of the beautiful and diverse San Francisco Bay Region. For this extensively revised and redesigned third edition of Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region, the identification keys have been thoroughly updated to include 21 new families, 155 new species, and approximately 330 changes in the scientific names, ensuring that this popular book will continue to be the most comprehensive and authoritative identification guide to the region’s native and introduced plants.

• Easy-to-use keys describe more than 2,000 species of wild flowers, trees, shrubs, ferns, and weeds.
• Hundreds of line drawings and color photographs support accurate identification.
• Plants are identified by both common and scientific names, making this guide an essential resource for amateur naturalists, students, and professionals.

Cover image for Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region, isbn: 9780520958234

The Galileo Affair

$33.95

In 1633 the Roman Inquisition concluded the trial of Galileo Galilei with a condemnation for heresy. The trial was itself the climax of a series of events which began two decades earlier (in 1613) and included another series of Inquisition proceedings in 1615-1616. Besides marking the end of the controversy that defines the original episode, the condemnation of 1633 also marks the beginning of another classic controversy-about the Galileo affair, its causes, its implications, and its lessons; about whether, for example, John Milton was right when in the Areopagitica he commented on his visit to Galileo in Florence by saying: "There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." I happen to be extremely interested in this second story and second controversy, and a critical interpretation of the affair remains one of my ultimate goals. But that is not the subject of the present work, which is rather concerned with something more fundamental, namely with the documentation of the original episode. To be more exact, the aim of this book is to provide a documentary history of the series of developments which began in 1613 and culminated in 1633 with the trial and condemnation of Galileo. That is, it aims to provide a collection of the essential texts and documents containing information about both the key events and the key issues. The documents have been translated into English from the original languages, primarily Italian and partly Latin; they have been selected, are arranged, annotated, introduced, and otherwise edited with the following guiding principles in mind: to make the book as self-contained as possible and to minimize contentious interpretation and evaluation. The Galileo affair is such a controversial and important topic that one needs a sourcebook from which to learn firsthand about the events and the issues; since no adequate volume of the kind exists, this work attempts to fill the lacuna. The originals of the documents translated and collected here can all be found in printed sources. In fact, with one exception they are all contained in the twenty volumes of the National Edition of Galileo's works, edited by Antonio Favaro and first published in 1890-1909. The exception is the recently discovered "Anonymous Complaint About The Assayer," whose original was discovered and first published in 1983 by Pietro Redondi; this document is also contained in the critical edition of the Inquisition proceedings edited by Sergio M. Pagano and published in 1984 by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. My selection was affected partly by the criterion of importance insofar as I chose documents that I felt to be (more or less) essential. Since I was also influenced by the double focus of this documentary history on events and issues, I therefore included two types of documents: the first consists of relatively short documents which are mostly either Inquisition proceedings (Chapters V and IX) or letters (Chapters I, VII, and VIII) and which primarily (though not exclusively) record various occurrences; the second type consists of longer essays by Galileo (Chapters II, Ill, IV, and VI) which discuss many of the central scientific and philosophical issues and have intrinsic importance independent of the affair. Finally, my goal of maximizing the autonomy of this volume suggested another reason for including some of these longer informative essays on the scientific issues (Chapters IV and VI).

Cover image for The Galileo Affair, isbn: 9780520909298

What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee

$31.95

Marks presents the field of molecular anthropology—a synthesis of the holistic approach of anthropology with the reductive approach of molecular genetics—as a way of improving our understanding of the science of human evolution. This iconoclastic, witty, and extremely readable book illuminates the deep background of our place in nature and asks us to think critically about what science is, and what passes for it, in modern society.

Cover image for What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee, isbn: 9780520930766

Andean Meltdown

$29.95

Andean Meltdown examines how climate change and its consequences for Peru's glaciers are affecting the country's water supply and impacting Andean society and culture in unprecedented ways. Drawing on forty years of extensive research, relationship building, and community engagement in Peru, Karsten Paerregaard provides an ethnographic exploration of Andean ritual practices and performances in the context of an altered climate. By documenting Andean peoples' responses to rapid glacier retreat and urgent water shortages, Paerregaard considers the myriad ways climate change intersects with environmental, social, and political change. A pathbreaking contribution to cultural anthropology and environmental humanities, Andean Meltdown challenges prevailing theoretical thinking about the culture-nature nexus and offers a new perspective on Andean peoples' understanding of their role as agents in the shifting relationship between humans and nonhumans.

Cover image for Andean Meltdown, isbn: 9780520393936

The Jepson Manual

$150.00

The second edition of The Jepson Manual thoroughly updates this acclaimed work, the single most comprehensive resource on California's amazingly diverse flora. Integrating the latest science with the results of intensive fieldwork, institutional collaboration, and the efforts of hundreds of contributing authors, this new edition is an essential reference on California's native and naturalized vascular plants.

This edition includes treatments of many newly described or discovered taxa and recently introduced plants, and it reflects major improvements in plant taxonomy. Nearly two-thirds of the 7,600 species, subspecies, and varieties that the volume describes are now illustrated with diagnostic drawings. Geographic distributions, elevation ranges, flowering times, nomenclature, and the status of non-natives and native taxa of special concern have all been updated throughout. The second edition also allows for identification of 240 alien taxa that are not fully naturalized and features a new chapter on geologic, climatic, and vegetation history of California.

Cover image for The Jepson Manual, isbn: 9780520951372

Forests of Refuge

$29.95

Forests of Refuge questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. Yolanda Ariadne Collins interrogates the most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities: the United Nations–endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores REDD+ in Guyana and neighboring Suriname, two highly forested countries in the Amazonian Guiana Shield with low deforestation rates. Yet REDD+ implementation there has been fraught with challenges. Adopting a multisited ethnographic approach, Forests of Refuge takes readers into the halls of policymaking, into conservation development organizations, and into forest-dependent communities most affected by environmental policies and exploitative colonial histories. This book situates these challenges in the inattentiveness of global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It advocates that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization.

Introduction to Water in California

$29.95

This thoroughly engaging, concise book tells the story of California's most precious resource, tracing the journey of water in the state from the atmosphere to the snowpack to our faucets and foods. Along the way, we learn much about California itself as the book describes its rivers, lakes, wetlands, dams, and aqueducts and discusses the role of water in agriculture, the environment, and politics. Essential reading in a state facing the future with an overextended water supply, this fascinating book shows that, for all Californians, every drop counts.

New to this updated edition:

* Additional maps, figures, and photos

* Expanded coverage of potential impacts to precipitation, snowpack, and water supply from climate change

* Updated information about the struggle for water management and potential solutions

* New content about sustainable groundwater use and regulation, desalination, water recycling, stormwater capture, and current proposals for water storage and diversion

*Additional table summarizing water sources for 360 California cities and towns

America's Largest Classroom

$29.95

Over the past 100 years, visitor learning at America’s national parks has grown and evolved. Today, there are over 400 National Park Service (NPS) sites, representing over eighty million acres. Sites exist in every US state and territory and are located on land, at sea, in remote areas, and in major urban centers. Every year, more than 300 million people visit national parks, and several million of them are children engaged in one of many educational programs hosted by the NPS.

America’s Largest Classrooms offers insight and practical advice for improving educational outreach at national parks as well as suggestions for classroom educators on how to meaningfully incorporate parks into their curricula. Via a wide collection of case studies—ranging from addressing inclusivity at parks and public lands to teaching about science and social issues—this book illustrates innovations and solutions that will be of interest to nature interpreters, outdoor educators, and policy makers, as well as professors in the sciences writ large.

Serendipity

$29.95

"Many of the findings in the book . . . are classics of ecology. . . . A rare and delightful insight into timely science."—Jane Lubchenco, Nature

"Estes's refreshing narrative deftly weaves rigorous science with personal reflection to create an absorbing and introspective read that is equal parts memoir, ecological textbook, and motivational guidebook for young ecologists."—Science

To newly minted biologist James Estes, the sea otters he was studying in the leafy kelp forests off the coast of Alaska appeared to have an unbalanced relationship with their greater environment. Gorging themselves on the sea urchins that grazed among the kelp, these small charismatic mammals seemed to give little back in return. But as Estes dug deeper, he unearthed a far more complex relationship between the otter and its underwater environment, discovering that otters play a critical role in driving positive ecosystem dynamics. While teasing out the connective threads, he began to question our assumptions about ecological relationships. These questions would ultimately inspire a lifelong quest to better understand the surprising complexity of our natural world and the unexpected ways we discover it.

Serendipity tells the story of James Estes’s life as a naturalist and the concepts that have driven his interest in researching the ecological role of top-level predators. Using the relationships between sea otters, kelp, and sea urchins as a touchstone, Estes retraces his investigations of numerous other species, ecosystems, and ecological processes in an attempt to discover why ecologists can learn so many details about the systems in which they work and yet understand so little about the broader processes that influence these systems. Part memoir, part natural history, and deeply inquisitive, Serendipity will entertain and inform readers as it raises thoughtful questions about our relationship with the natural world.

Reintroduction of Fish and Wildlife Populations

$70.00

Reintroduction of Fish and Wildlife Populations provides a practical step-by-step guide to successfully planning, implementing, and evaluating the reestablishment of animal populations in former habitats or their introduction in new environments. In each chapter, experts in reintroduction biology outline a comprehensive synthesis of core concepts, issues, techniques, and perspectives. This manual and reference supports scientists and managers from fisheries and wildlife professions as they plan reintroductions, initiate releases of individuals, and manage restored populations over time. Covering a broad range of taxonomic groups, ecosystems, and global regions, this edited volume is an essential guide for academics, students, and professionals in natural resource management.

Return to the Sea

$24.95

Return to the Sea portrays the life and evolutionary times of marine mammals—from giant whales and sea cows that originated 55 million years ago to the deep-diving elephant seals and clam-eating walruses of modern times. This fascinating account of the origin of various marine-mammal lineages—some extinct, others extant but threatened—is for the nonspecialist. Against a backdrop of geologic time and changing climates and geography, this volume takes evolution as its unifying principle to help us to understand today’s diversity of marine mammals and their responses to environmental challenges. Annalisa Berta explains current controversies and explores patterns of change now taking place, such as shifting food webs and predator-prey relationships, habitat degradation, global warming, and the effects of humans on marine-mammal communities.

Flame and Fortune in the American West

$29.95

Flame and Fortune in the American West creatively and meticulously investigates the ongoing politics, folly, and avarice shaping the production of increasingly widespread yet dangerous suburban and exurban landscapes. The 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire is used as a starting point to better understand these complex social-environmental processes. The Tunnel Fire is the most destructive fire—in terms of structures lost—in California history. More than 3,000 residential structures burned and 25 lives were lost. Although this fire occurred in Oakland and Berkeley, others like it sear through landscapes in California and the American West that have experienced urban growth and development within areas historically prone to fire.

Simon skillfully blends techniques from environmental history, political ecology, and science studies to closely examine the Tunnel Fire within a broader historical and spatial context of regional economic development and natural-resource management, such as the widespread planting of eucalyptus trees as an exotic lure for homeowners and the creation of hillside neighborhoods for tax revenue—decisions that produced communities with increased vulnerability to fire. Simon demonstrates how in Oakland a drive for affluence led to a state of vulnerability for rich and poor alike that has only been exacerbated by the rebuilding of neighborhoods after the fire. Despite these troubling trends, Flame and Fortune in the American West illustrates how many popular and scientific debates on fire limit the scope and efficacy of policy responses.

These risky yet profitable developments (what the author refers to as the Incendiary), as well as proposed strategies for challenging them, are discussed in the context of urbanizing areas around the American West and hold global applicability within hazard-prone areas.

Bone Histology of Fossil Tetrapods

$85.00

The microscopic examination of fossilized bone tissue is a sophisticated and increasingly important analytical tool for understanding the life history of ancient organisms. This book provides an essential primer and manual for using fossil bone histology to investigate the biology of extinct tetrapods. Twelve experts summarize advances in the field over the past three decades, reviewing fundamental basics of bone microanatomy and physiology. Research specimen selection, thin-section preparation, and data analysis are addressed in detail. The authors also outline methods and issues in bone growth rate calculation and chronological age determination, as well as how to examine broader questions of behavior, ecology, and evolution by studying the microstructure of bone.

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, Second Revised edition

$34.95

This 1967 edition of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is a revision of a 1953 edition. It includes a foreword by Albert Einstein, which is presented in en face German and English versions.

The translation itself is based on the definitive National Edition prepared under the direction of Antonio Favaro and published at Florence in 1897. The material specifically added to the text by Galileo himself after publication of the first edition (1632) has been included as well. In addition, the margins of the book include translations of Galileo's own postils (running notes), placed as nearly as possible beside their textual references.

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, Second Revised edition

The Myth of Continents

$34.95

In this thoughtful and engaging critique, geographer Martin W. Lewis and historian Kären Wigen reexamine the basic geographical divisions we take for granted, and challenge the unconscious spatial frameworks that govern the way we perceive the world. Arguing that notions of East vs. West, First World vs. Third World, and even the sevenfold continental system are simplistic and misconceived, the authors trace the history of such misconceptions. Their up-to-the-minute study reflects both on the global scale and its relation to the specific continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa—actually part of one contiguous landmass.

The Myth of Continents sheds new light on how our metageographical assumptions grew out of cultural concepts: how the first continental divisions developed from classical times; how the Urals became the division between the so-called continents of Europe and Asia; how countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan recently shifted macroregions in the general consciousness.

This extremely readable and thought-provoking analysis also explores the ways that new economic regions, the end of the cold war, and the proliferation of communication technologies change our understanding of the world. It stimulates thinking about the role of large-scale spatial constructs as driving forces behind particular worldviews and encourages everyone to take a more thoughtful, geographically informed approach to the task of describing and interpreting the human diversity of the planet.

Ants of North America

$38.95

Ants are among the most conspicuous and the most ecologically important of insects. This concise, easy-to-use, authoritative identification guide introduces the fascinating and diverse ant fauna of the United States and Canada. It features the first illustrated key to North American ant genera, discusses distribution patterns, explores ant ecology and natural history, and includes a list of all currently recognized ant species in this large region.

* New keys to the 73 North American ant genera illustrated with 250 line drawings ensure accurate identification

* 180 color images show the head and profile of each genus and important species groups

* Includes a glossary of important terms

Field Guide to Owls of California and the West

$29.95

Most owls are almost perfectly adapted to life in the dark. Their vaguely humanoid faces reflect the spectacular evolution of their hearing and vision, which has made flight, romance, and predation possible in the near absence of light. This accessible guide, full of intriguing anecdotes, covers all 19 species of owls occurring in North America. More than an identification guide, Field Guide to Owls of California and the West describes the biology and behavior of owls to make finding and identifying them easier and watching them more enjoyable. The guide also explores the conservation challenges that owls face and tells how owls provide insights to scientists working in fields from technology to health.

* Color plates illustrate each species

* Range maps show the western distribution of North America's owls, 14 of which occur in California

* Offers tips for finding and watching owls

* Gives information on how to design, place, and maintain nest boxes

* Describes human attitudes toward owls through history, including in Native American cultures of the West

Field Guide to Owls of California and the West

Adventures among Ants

$26.95

Intrepid international explorer, biologist, and photographer Mark W. Moffett, “the Indiana Jones of entomology,” takes us around the globe on a strange and colorful journey in search of the hidden world of ants. In tales from Nigeria, Indonesia, the Amazon, Australia, California, and elsewhere, Moffett recounts his entomological exploits and provides fascinating details on how ants live and how they dominate their ecosystems through strikingly human behaviors, yet at a different scale and a faster tempo. Moffett’s spectacular close-up photographs shrink us down to size, so that we can observe ants in familiar roles; warriors, builders, big-game hunters, and slave owners. We find them creating marketplaces and assembly lines and dealing with issues we think of as uniquely human—including hygiene, recycling, and warfare. Adventures among Ants introduces some of the world’s most awe-inspiring species and offers a startling new perspective on the limits of our own perception.

• Ants are world-class road builders, handling traffic problems on thoroughfares that dwarf our highway systems in their complexity

• Ants with the largest societies often deploy complicated military tactics

• Some ants have evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, domesticating other insects and growing crops for food

Fire in California's Ecosystems

$120.00

Fire in California’s Ecosystems describes fire in detail—both as an integral natural process in the California landscape and as a growing threat to urban and suburban developments in the state. Written by many of the foremost authorities on the subject, this comprehensive volume is an ideal authoritative reference tool and the foremost synthesis of knowledge on the science, ecology, and management of fire in California. Part One introduces the basics of fire ecology, including overviews of historical fires, vegetation, climate, weather, fire as a physical and ecological process, and fire regimes, and reviews the interactions between fire and the physical, plant, and animal components of the environment. Part Two explores the history and ecology of fire in each of California's nine bioregions. Part Three examines fire management in California during Native American and post-Euro-American settlement and also current issues related to fire policy such as fuel management, watershed management, air quality, invasive plant species, at-risk species, climate change, social dynamics, and the future of fire management. This edition includes critical scientific and management updates and four new chapters on fire weather, fire regimes, climate change, and social dynamics.

Cover image for Fire in California's Ecosystems, isbn: 9780520961913

The Constant Fire

$24.95

Eloquent, urgent, and inspiring, The Constant Fire tackles the acrimonious debate between science and religion, taking us beyond its stagnant parameters into the wider domain of human spiritual experience. From a Neolithic archaeological site in Ireland to modern theories of star formation, Adam Frank traverses a wide terrain, broadening our sights and allowing us to imagine an alternative perspective. Drawing from his experience as a practicing astrophysicist and from the writings of the great scholars of religion, philosophy, and mythology, Frank locates the connective tissue linking science and religion—their commonality as sacred pursuits—and finds their shared aspiration in pursuit of "the True and the Real." Taking us from the burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600 to Einstein and on to today's pressing issues of global warming and resource depletion, The Constant Fire shows us how to move beyond this stale debate into a more profound experience of the world as sacred—a world that embraces science without renouncing human spirituality.

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Terrestrial Vegetation of California, 3rd Edition

$99.95

This thoroughly revised, entirely rewritten edition of what is the essential reference on California’s diverse and ever-changing vegetation now brings readers the most authoritative, state-of-the-art view of California’s plant ecosystems available. Integrating decades of research, leading community ecologists and field botanists describe and classify California’s vegetation types, identify environmental factors that determine the distribution of vegetation types, analyze the role of disturbance regimes in vegetation dynamics, chronicle change due to human activities, identify conservation issues, describe restoration strategies, and prioritize directions for new research. Several new chapters address statewide issues such as the historic appearance and impact of introduced and invasive plants, the soils of California, and more.

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Science v. Story

$29.95

Uncovering common threads across types of science skepticism to show why these controversial narratives stick and how we can more effectively counter them through storytelling

Science v. Story analyzes four scientific controversies—climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19—through the lens of storytelling. Instead of viewing stories as adversaries to scientific practices, Emma Frances Bloomfield demonstrates how storytelling is integral to science communication. Drawing from narrative theory and rhetorical studies, Science v. Story examines scientific stories and rival stories, including disingenuous rival stories that undermine scientific conclusions and productive rival stories that work to make science more inclusive.

Science v. Story offers two tools to evaluate and build stories: narrative webs and narrative constellations. These visual mapping tools chart the features of a story (i.e., characters, action, sequence, scope, storyteller, and content) to locate opportunities for audience engagement. Bloomfield ultimately argues that we can strengthen science communication by incorporating storytelling in critical ways that are attentive to audience and context.

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The California Nitrogen Assessment

$75.00

Nitrogen is indispensable to all life on Earth. However, humans now dominate the nitrogen cycle, and nitrogen emissions from human activity have real costs: water and air pollution, climate change, and detrimental effects on human health, biodiversity, and natural habitats. Too little nitrogen limits ecosystem processes, while too much nitrogen transforms ecosystems profoundly.

The California Nitrogen Assessment is the first comprehensive account of nitrogen flows, practices, and policies for California, encompassing all nitrogen flows—not just those associated with agriculture—and their impacts on ecosystem services and human wellbeing. How California handles nitrogen issues will be of interest nationally and internationally, and the goal of the assessment is to link science with action and to produce information that affects both future policy and solutions for addressing nitrogen pollution. This book also provides a model for application of integrated ecosystem assessment methods at regional and state (subnational) levels.

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Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America

$26.95

* Features detailed species accounts; gives information on horned lizard biology, ecology, and evolution; and describes the role of these fascinating reptiles in mythology, culture, and art

* Covers the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and includes all species of horned lizards

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Shorebird Ecology, Conservation, and Management

$85.00

Shorebirds are model organisms for illustrating the principles of ecology and excellent subjects for research. Their mating systems are as diverse as any avian group, their migrations push the limits of endurance, and their foraging is easily studied in the open habitats of estuaries and freshwater wetlands. This comprehensive text explores the ecology, conservation, and management of these fascinating birds. Beginning chapters examine phylogenetic relationships between shorebirds and other birds, and cover shorebird morphology, anatomy, and physiology. A section on breeding biology looks in detail at their reproductive biology. Because shorebirds spend much of their time away from breeding areas, a substantial section on non-breeding biology covers migration, foraging ecology, and social behavior. The text also covers shorebird demography, population size, and management issues related to habitat, predators, and human disturbances. Throughout, it emphasizes applying scientific knowledge to the conservation of shorebird populations, many of which are unfortunately in decline.

Cover image for Shorebird Ecology, Conservation, and Management, isbn: 9780520947962

The Principia: The Authoritative Translation and Guide

$34.95

In his monumental 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as the Principia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles.

This authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms.

Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the Principia also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system.

The illuminating Guide to Newton's Principia by I. Bernard Cohen makes this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.

Cover image for The Principia: The Authoritative Translation and Guide, isbn: 9780520964815

From c-Numbers to q-Numbers

$29.95

From c-Numbers to q-Numbers: The Classical Analogy in the History of Quantum Theory explores the critical role of classical analogies in the development of quantum theory, examining how key figures such as Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Dirac employed these analogies to bridge the gap between classical and quantum mechanics. At the heart of the book is the idea that quantum mechanics, while radically different from classical theories, still relies heavily on formal structures and mathematical procedures inherited from classical physics. By analyzing three major stages in quantum theory—Planck's radiation theory, Bohr's atomic theory, and Dirac's quantum mechanics—the book reveals how analogies with classical theories not only facilitated the formation of quantum ideas but also provided a framework that allowed quantum mechanics to evolve from classical roots.

The book identifies four distinct types of classical analogies: Planck's horizontal analogy, which merely extended classical methods; Bohr's vertical analogies, which involved more direct, though incomplete, translations of classical laws; Heisenberg's and Dirac's analogies, which mathematically aligned classical and quantum mechanics; and Dirac's use of relativistic strategies for theory-building. These analogies were essential in navigating the intellectual challenges of quantum mechanics, especially in the absence of complete theories. The study underscores the continuity between classical and quantum physics, illustrating how quantum theory, through its innovative use of mathematical formalisms, preserved the elegance of classical mechanics while embracing new, non-intuitive principles. This approach shows that the construction of quantum theory was deeply intertwined with classical precedents, allowing quantum mechanics to mature while maintaining connections to earlier frameworks of understanding.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

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Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question

$19.95

The first book-length exploration of climate-driven reproductive anxiety that places race and social justice at the center.

Eco-anxiety. Climate guilt. Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Solastalgia. The study of environmental emotions and related mental health impacts is a rapidly growing field, but most researchers overlook a closely related concern: reproductive anxiety. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question is the first comprehensive study of how environmental emotions influence whether, when, and why people today decide to become parents—or not.

Jade S. Sasser argues that we can and should continue to create the families we desire, but that doing so equitably will require deep commitments to social, reproductive, and climate justice. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question presents original research, drawing from in-depth interviews and national survey results that analyze the role of race in environmental emotions and the reproductive plans young people are making as a result. Sasser concludes that climate emotions and climate justice are inseparable, and that culturally appropriate mental and emotional health services are a necessary component to ensure climate justice for vulnerable communities.

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The Dusky-Footed Wood Rat

$38.95

The Dusky-footed Wood Rat: A Record of Observations Made on the Hastings Natural History Reservation provides a detailed account of the dusky-footed wood rat, a rodent species studied extensively at the Frances Simes Hastings Natural History Reservation in California. Located in the northern Santa Lucia Mountains, the reservation has been a site for observing biotic changes and studying the behaviors of vertebrate animals, particularly mammals like rodents. The dusky-footed wood rat, known for its distinctive houses made from sticks, has shown a more stable population compared to other rodents, which is indicative of its successful adaptation to the brushland and woodland environments of the region. This book focuses on the animals' behavior, their interaction with their environment, and how individual wood rats maintain order in their population.

Through years of fieldwork and intensive study, the authors document the behavior of these animals, focusing on their responses to changes in their surroundings and interactions with other rats. By tracing individual rats over time, the study provides insights into their behavior patterns, habitat preferences, and reproductive cycles. The research, based on over ten years of continuous observation, reveals previously unexamined aspects of wood rat life that were unknown in earlier studies. This book also presents the complexity of wood rat distribution, habits, and life cycles, acknowledging that while some aspects remain elusive, a clear pattern emerges in their responses to the environment. The findings shed light on the species' behavior and ecology, offering valuable insights into how they thrive within their specific habitats.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.

Cover image for The Dusky-Footed Wood Rat, isbn: 9780520349018

DNA, Race, and Reproduction

$34.95

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

DNA, Race, and Reproduction helps readers inside and outside of academia evaluate and engage with the current genomic landscape. It brings together expertise in law, medicine, religion, history, anthropology, philosophy, and genetics to examine how scientists, medical professionals, and laypeople use genomic concepts to construct racial identity and make or advise reproductive decisions, often at the same moment. It critically and accessibly interrogates how DNA figures in the reproduction of racialized bodies and the racialization of reproduction and examines the privileged position from which genomic knowledge claims to speak about human bodies, societies, and activities. The volume begins from the premise that reproduction, regardless of the means, forces a confrontation between biomedical, scientific, and popular understandings of genetics, and that those understandings are often racialized. It therefore centers reproduction as both a site of analysis and an analytic lens.

California Catastrophes

$95.00

This comprehensive account of California’s numerous and perilous natural disasters explores how a unique combination of forces has affected Californians throughout the state's history and carries a sobering message about our short disaster memories.

California has more natural hazards per square mile than any other state, but this hasn’t deterred people from moving here. Entire California towns and regions frequently contend with destruction caused by earthquakes, floods, landslides and debris flows, and sea-level rise and coastal erosion. As Gary Griggs demonstrates in California Catastrophes, few years go by without a disaster of some kind, and residents often rebuild in the same locations that were just destroyed.

Considering the current climate crisis and increasing environmental inequalities, the stakes are growing ever higher. This book dives into the history of the state’s vulnerability to natural hazards, why and where these events occur, and how Californians can better prepare going forward. A mix of photographs and maps both historical and contemporary orients readers within the state’s sprawling landscapes and provides glimpses of some of the geologic risks in each region. With the final chapter, Griggs issues a call to action and challenges readers to envision a safer, more equitable, and sustainable future.

Encoding Bioethics

$85.00

Encoding Bioethics addresses important ethical concerns from the perspective of each of the stakeholders who will develop, deploy, and use artificial intelligence systems to support clinical decisions. Utilizing an applied ethical model of patient-centered care, this book considers the viewpoints of programmers, health system and health insurance leaders, clinicians, and patients when AI is used in clinical decision-making. The authors build on their respective experiences as a surgeon-bioethicist and a surgeon–AI developer to give the reader an accessible account of the relevant ethical considerations raised when AI systems are introduced into the physician-patient relationship.

Science v. Story

$85.00

Uncovering common threads across types of science skepticism to show why these controversial narratives stick and how we can more effectively counter them through storytelling

Science v. Story analyzes four scientific controversies—climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19—through the lens of storytelling. Instead of viewing stories as adversaries to scientific practices, Emma Frances Bloomfield demonstrates how storytelling is integral to science communication. Drawing from narrative theory and rhetorical studies, Science v. Story examines scientific stories and rival stories, including disingenuous rival stories that undermine scientific conclusions and productive rival stories that work to make science more inclusive.

Science v. Story offers two tools to evaluate and build stories: narrative webs and narrative constellations. These visual mapping tools chart the features of a story (i.e., characters, action, sequence, scope, storyteller, and content) to locate opportunities for audience engagement. Bloomfield ultimately argues that we can strengthen science communication by incorporating storytelling in critical ways that are attentive to audience and context.

The Dusky-Footed Wood Rat

$65.00

The Dusky-footed Wood Rat: A Record of Observations Made on the Hastings Natural History Reservation provides a detailed account of the dusky-footed wood rat, a rodent species studied extensively at the Frances Simes Hastings Natural History Reservation in California. Located in the northern Santa Lucia Mountains, the reservation has been a site for observing biotic changes and studying the behaviors of vertebrate animals, particularly mammals like rodents. The dusky-footed wood rat, known for its distinctive houses made from sticks, has shown a more stable population compared to other rodents, which is indicative of its successful adaptation to the brushland and woodland environments of the region. This book focuses on the animals' behavior, their interaction with their environment, and how individual wood rats maintain order in their population.

Through years of fieldwork and intensive study, the authors document the behavior of these animals, focusing on their responses to changes in their surroundings and interactions with other rats. By tracing individual rats over time, the study provides insights into their behavior patterns, habitat preferences, and reproductive cycles. The research, based on over ten years of continuous observation, reveals previously unexamined aspects of wood rat life that were unknown in earlier studies. This book also presents the complexity of wood rat distribution, habits, and life cycles, acknowledging that while some aspects remain elusive, a clear pattern emerges in their responses to the environment. The findings shed light on the species' behavior and ecology, offering valuable insights into how they thrive within their specific habitats.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.

Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World

$75.00

This edition presents Andrew Motte’s 1729 English translation of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, thoroughly revised and annotated by historian Florian Cajori (with R. T. Crawford stewarding the final publication after Cajori’s death in 1930). It opens with a portrait and Halley’s celebratory ode, then the prefaces to the first three Latin editions, where Newton defines “rational mechanics” as the mathematical study of motion and forces, and declares his program: from phenomena infer forces, then from forces deduce further phenomena. Book I develops the mathematical tools (limits, conics, central forces, apsidal motion, pendula), proving that orbits with equal-areas law imply centripetal attraction. Book II treats motion in resisting media—drag proportional to velocity or its square, hydrostatics, pendular resistance, and waves—bridging ideal dynamics and real fluids. Book III applies the theory to the heavens, stating “Rules of Reasoning,” listing “Phenomena,” and deriving universal gravitation, lunar nodes, tides, precession, cometary paths, and the *General Scholium*. A separate “System of the World” offers a more synthetic exposition. Cajori’s extensive appendix supplies historical and explanatory notes throughout.

Cotes’s preface to the second edition champions Newton’s experimental philosophy against scholastic “occult qualities” and Cartesian vortices. He argues from terrestrial gravitation and pendulum experiments to mutual attraction, then by Keplerian area and period–distance laws to centripetal forces inversely as the square of distance, unifying moon, planets, and comets under a single gravitational principle. The prefaces chronicle Newton’s method (analysis from phenomena; synthesis to prediction), Halley’s role in pressing publication, and later refinements to lunar theory, precession, comet orbits, and fluid resistance. Altogether, the volume frames the *Principia* as both a mathematical edifice and a philosophical watershed: geometry and experiment joined to reveal a world governed not by speculative mechanisms but by demonstrable universal laws.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1934.

Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World

Plants, Man and Life

$39.95

Plants, Man, and Life by Edgar Anderson is a pioneering exploration of the intricate relationships between humanity and the plant world, written with a keen eye for both scientific inquiry and accessibility. Originally conceived as a digest of botanical knowledge, Anderson’s work defied expectations, focusing instead on the gaps in understanding and the questions yet to be answered about the plants on which humans depend. His narrative offers a blend of personal observations, historical context, and vivid examples, from the role of weeds and cultivated plants in shaping landscapes to the diverse uses of dooryard flora in underdeveloped countries. These unorthodox insights captivated a broad spectrum of readers, from scientists to curious laypeople, making the book a touchstone in the field of ethnobotany.

Written with a conversational style aimed at the intellectually curious—embodied by figures like Pandit Nehru, whom Anderson imagined as his ideal reader—the book remains a testament to the evolving nature of botanical science. Its discussions of underexplored subjects, such as the cultural significance of plants and their ecological adaptations, have inspired generations of botanists, ecologists, and anthropologists. With its interdisciplinary approach and its ability to bridge gaps between academic and general audiences, Plants, Man, and Life continues to be a valuable resource for understanding the vital connections between people and the plant kingdom.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1952.

Tracks and Shadows

$29.95

Intellectually rich, intensely personal, and beautifully written, Tracks and Shadows is both an absorbing autobiography of a celebrated field biologist and a celebration of beauty in nature. Harry W. Greene, award-winning author of Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature, delves into the poetry of field biology, showing how nature eases our existential quandaries. More than a memoir, the book is about the wonder of snakes, the beauty of studying and understanding natural history, and the importance of sharing the love of nature with humanity.

Greene begins with his youthful curiosity about the natural world and moves to his stints as a mortician's assistant, ambulance driver, and army medic. In detailing his academic career, he describes how his work led him to believe that nature’s most profound lessons lurk in hard-won details. He discusses the nuts and bolts of field research and teaching, contrasts the emotional impact of hot dry habitats with hot wet ones, imparts the basics of snake biology, and introduces the great explorers Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. He reflects on friendship and happiness, tackles notions like anthropomorphism and wilderness, and argues that organisms remain the core of biology, science plays key roles in conservation, and natural history offers an enlightened form of contentment.

Pheromone Communication in Moths

$75.00

Common among moths is a mate-finding system in which females emit a pheromone that induces males to fly upwind along the pheromone plume. Since the chemical pheromone of the domesticated silk moth was identified in 1959, a steady increase in the number of moth species whose pheromone attractants have been identified now results in a rich base for review and synthesis.

Pheromone Communication in Moths summarizes moth pheromone biology, covering the chemical structures used by the various lineages, signal production and perception, the genetic control of moth pheromone traits, interactions of pheromones with host-plant volatiles, pheromone dispersal and orientation, male pheromones and courtship, and the evolutionary forces that have likely shaped pheromone signals and their role in sexual selection. Also included are chapters on practical applications in the control and monitoring of pest species as well as case studies that address pheromone systems in a number of species and groups of closely allied species.

Pheromone Communication in Moths is an invaluable resource for entomologists, chemical ecologists, pest-management scientists, and professionals who study pheromone communication and pest management.

The Practice of Reproducible Research

$29.95

The Practice of Reproducible Research presents concrete examples of how researchers in the data-intensive sciences are working to improve the reproducibility of their research projects. In each of the thirty-one case studies in this volume, the author or team describes the workflow that they used to complete a real-world research project. Authors highlight how they utilized particular tools, ideas, and practices to support reproducibility, emphasizing the very practical how, rather than the why or what, of conducting reproducible research.

Part 1 provides an accessible introduction to reproducible research, a basic reproducible research project template, and a synthesis of lessons learned from across the thirty-one case studies. Parts 2 and 3 focus on the case studies themselves. The Practice of Reproducible Research is an invaluable resource for students and researchers who wish to better understand the practice of data-intensive sciences and learn how to make their own research more reproducible.

Floodplains

$44.95

Floodplains provides an overview of floodplains and their management in temperate regions. It synthesizes decades of research on floodplain ecosystems, explaining hydrologic, geomorphic, and ecological processes and how under appropriate management these processes can provide benefits to society ranging from healthy fish populations to flood-risk reduction. Drawing on the framework of reconciliation ecology, the authors explore how new concepts for floodplain ecosystem restoration and management can increase these benefits. Additionally, they use case studies from California’s Central Valley and other temperate regions to show how innovative management approaches are reshaping rivers and floodplains around the world.

The Principia: The Authoritative Translation

$19.95

In his monumental 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as the Principia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles.

This authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms.

Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the Principia also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system.

The translation-only edition of this preeminent work is truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.

The Principia: The Authoritative Translation and Guide

$95.00

In his monumental 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as the Principia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles.

This authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms.

Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the Principia also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system.

The illuminating Guide to Newton's Principia by I. Bernard Cohen makes this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.

Designed with collectors in mind, this deluxe edition has faux leather binding covered with a beautiful dustjacket.

Coasts in Crisis

$29.95

Coastal regions around the world have become increasingly crowded, intensively developed, and severely exploited. Hundreds of millions of people living in these low-lying areas are subject to short-term coastal hazards such as cyclones, hurricanes, and destruction due to El Niño, and are also exposed to the long-term threat of global sea-level rise. These massive concentrations of people expose often-fragile coastal environments to the runoff and pollution from municipal, industrial, and agricultural sources as well as the impacts of resource exploitation and a wide range of other human impacts. Can environmental impacts be reduced or mitigated and can coastal regions adapt to natural hazards?

Coasts in Crisis is a comprehensive assessment of the impacts that the human population is having on the coastal zone globally and the diverse ways in which coastal hazards impact human settlement and development. Gary Griggs provides a concise overview of the individual hazards, risks, and issues threatening the coastal zone.

Traveling the 38th Parallel

$29.95

Between extremes of climate farther north and south, the 38th North parallel line marks a temperate, middle latitude where human societies have thrived since the beginning of civilization. It divides North and South Korea, passes through Athens and San Francisco, and bisects Mono Lake in the eastern Sierra Nevada, where authors David and Janet Carle make their home. Former park rangers, the authors set out on an around-the-world journey in search of water-related environmental and cultural intersections along the 38th parallel. This book is a chronicle of their adventures as they meet people confronting challenges in water supply, pollution, wetlands loss, and habitat protection. At the heart of the narrative are the riveting stories of the passionate individuals—scientists, educators, and local activists—who are struggling to preserve some of the world's most amazing, yet threatened, landscapes.

Traveling largely outside of cities, away from well-beaten tourist tracks, the authors cross Japan, Korea, China, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Greece, Sicily, Spain, Portugal, the Azores Islands, and the United States—from Chesapeake Bay to San Francisco Bay. The stories they gather provide stark contrasts as well as reaffirming similarities across diverse cultures. Generously illustrated with maps and photos, Traveling the 38th Parallel documents devastating environmental losses but also inspiring gains made through the efforts of dedicated individuals working against the odds to protect these fragile places.

The Mountains That Remade America

$29.95

From ski towns to national parks, fresh fruit to environmental lawsuits, the Sierra Nevada has changed the way Americans live. Whether and where there was gold to be mined redefined land, mineral, and water laws. Where rain falls (and where it doesn’t) determines whose fruit grows on trees and whose appears on slot machines. All this emerges from the geology of the range and how it changed history, and in so doing, changed the country.

The Mountains That Remade America combines geology with history to show how the particular forces and conditions that created the Sierra Nevada have effected broad outcomes and influenced daily life in the United States in the past and how they continue to do so today. Drawing connections between events in historical geology and contemporary society, Craig H. Jones makes geological science accessible and shows the vast impact this mountain range has had on the American West.

Serendipity

$24.95

"Many of the findings in the book . . . are classics of ecology. . . . A rare and delightful insight into timely science."—Jane Lubchenco, Nature

"Estes's refreshing narrative deftly weaves rigorous science with personal reflection to create an absorbing and introspective read that is equal parts memoir, ecological textbook, and motivational guidebook for young ecologists."—Science

To newly minted biologist James Estes, the sea otters he was studying in the leafy kelp forests off the coast of Alaska appeared to have an unbalanced relationship with their greater environment. Gorging themselves on the sea urchins that grazed among the kelp, these small charismatic mammals seemed to give little back in return. But as Estes dug deeper, he unearthed a far more complex relationship between the otter and its underwater environment, discovering that otters play a critical role in driving positive ecosystem dynamics. While teasing out the connective threads, he began to question our assumptions about ecological relationships. These questions would ultimately inspire a lifelong quest to better understand the surprising complexity of our natural world and the unexpected ways we discover it.

Serendipity tells the story of James Estes’s life as a naturalist and the concepts that have driven his interest in researching the ecological role of top-level predators. Using the relationships between sea otters, kelp, and sea urchins as a touchstone, Estes retraces his investigations of numerous other species, ecosystems, and ecological processes in an attempt to discover why ecologists can learn so many details about the systems in which they work and yet understand so little about the broader processes that influence these systems. Part memoir, part natural history, and deeply inquisitive, Serendipity will entertain and inform readers as it raises thoughtful questions about our relationship with the natural world.

Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes

$75.00

The North American freshwater fish fauna is the most diverse and thoroughly researched temperate fish fauna in the world. Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes is the only textbook to provide advanced undergraduate and graduate students and researchers with an up-to-date and integrated view of the ecological and evolutionary concepts, principles, and processes involved in the formation and maintenance of this fauna.

Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes provides readers with a broad understanding of why specific species and assemblages occur in particular places. Additionally, the text explores how individuals and species interact with each other and with their environments, how such interactions have been altered by anthropogenic impacts, and the relative success of efforts to restore damaged ecosystems.

This book is designed for use in courses related to aquatic and fish ecology, fish biology, ichthyology, and related advanced ecology and conservation courses, and is divided into five sections for ease of use. Chapter summaries, supplemental reading lists, online sources, extensive figures, and color photography are included to guide readers through the material and facilitate student learning.

Part 1: Faunal origins, evolution, and diversity

Presents a broad picture—both spatially and temporally—of the derivation of the fauna, including global and regional geological and climatological processes and their effects on North American fishes.

Part 2: Formation, maintenance, and persistence of local populations and assemblages

Focuses on how local fish populations and assemblages are formed and how they persist, or not, through time.

Part 3: Form and function

Deals with the relationship of body form and life history patterns as they are related to ecological functions.

Part 4: Interactions among individuals and species

Discusses the numerous interactions among individuals and species through communication, competition, predation, mutualism, and facilitation.

Part 5: Issues in conservation

Focuses on several primary conservation issues such as flow alterations and the increasing biotic homogenization of faunas.

Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes

Ocean Outbreak

$26.95

Winner of the Sustainability Science Award 2020, Ecological Society of America
Winner of the PROSE Award (Biological Sciences category) 2020, Association of American Publishers

There is a growing crisis in our oceans: mysterious outbreaks of infectious disease are on the rise. Marine epidemics can cause mass die-offs of wildlife from the bottom to the top of food chains, impacting the health of ocean ecosystems as well as lives on land. Portending global environmental disaster, ocean outbreaks are fueled by warming seas, sewage dumping, unregulated aquaculture, and drifting plastic.

Ocean Outbreak follows renowned scientist Drew Harvell and her colleagues into the field as they investigate how four iconic marine animals—corals, abalone, salmon, and starfish—have been devastated by disease. Based on over twenty years of research, this firsthand account of the sometimes gradual, sometimes exploding impact of disease on our ocean’s biodiversity ends with solutions and a call to action. Only through policy changes and the implementation of innovative solutions from nature can we reduce major outbreaks, save some ocean ecosystems, and protect our fragile environment.

North American Amphibians

$75.00

Some 300 species of amphibians inhabit North America. The past two decades have seen an enormous growth in interest about amphibians and an increased intensity of scientific research into their fascinating biology and continent-wide distribution.

This atlas presents the spectacular diversity of North American amphibians in a geographic context. It covers all formally recognized amphibian species found in the United States and Canada, many of which are endangered or threatened with extinction. Illustrated with maps and photos, the species accounts provide current information about distribution, habitat, and conservation.

Researchers, professional herpetologists, and anyone intrigued by amphibians will value North American Amphibians as a guide and reference.

Fishes: A Guide to Their Diversity

$34.95

There are more than 33,000 species of living fishes, accounting for more than half of the extant vertebrate diversity on Earth. This unique and comprehensive reference showcases the basic anatomy and diversity of all 82 orders of fishes and more than 150 of the most commonly encountered families, focusing on their distinctive features.

Accurate identification of each group, including its distinguishing characteristics, is supported with clear photographs of preserved specimens, primarily from the archives of the Marine Vertebrate Collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This diagnostic information is supplemented by radiographs, additional illustrations of particularly diverse lineages, and key references and ecological information for each group.

An ideal companion to primary ichthyology texts, Fishes: A Guide to Their Diversity gives a broad overview of fish morphology arranged in a modern classification system for students, fisheries scientists, marine biologists, vertebrate zoologists, and everyday naturalists. This survey of the most speciose group of vertebrates on Earth will expand the appreciation of and interest in the amazing diversity of fishes.

Historical Biogeography of Neotropical Freshwater Fishes

$100.00

The fish faunas of continental South and Central America constitute one of the greatest concentrations of aquatic diversity on Earth, consisting of about 10 percent of all living vertebrate species. Historical Biogeography of Neotropical Freshwater Fishes explores the evolutionary origins of this unique ecosystem. The chapters address central themes in the study of tropical biodiversity: why is the Amazon basin home to so many distinct evolutionary lineages? What roles do ecological specialization, speciation, and extinction play in the formation of regional assemblages? How do dispersal barriers contribute to isolation and diversification? Focusing on whole faunas rather than individual taxonomic groups, this volume shows that the area’s high regional diversity is not the result of recent diversification in lowland tropical rainforests. Rather, it is the product of species accumulating over tens of millions of years and across a continental arena.

Historical Biogeography of Neotropical Freshwater Fishes

The Biology of Chameleons

$65.00

They change color depending on their mood. They possess uniquely adapted hands and feet distinct from other tetrapods. They feature independently movable eyes. This comprehensive volume delves into these fascinating details and thorough research about one of the most charismatic families of reptiles—Chameleonidae.

Written for professional herpetologists, scholars, researchers, and students, this book takes readers on a voyage across time to discover everything that is known about chameleon biology: anatomy, physiology, adaptations, ecology, behavior, biogeography, phylogeny, classification, and conservation.

A description of the natural history of chameleons is given, along with the fossil record and typical characteristics of each genus. The state of chameleons in the modern world is also depicted, complete with new information on the most serious threats to these remarkable reptiles.

Ants of Africa and Madagascar

$49.95

Across the Afrotropical and Malagasy regions, ants are one of the most conspicuous and ecologically dominant animal groups. From driver ants to weaver ants, there are over 2,000 species in Africa alone and over 600 in Madagascar.

Ants of Africa and Madagascar introduces readers to the fascinating and diverse ant fauna of the Afrotropical and Malagasy regions. Featuring illustrated keys to subfamilies, separate keys to Afrotropical and Malagasy ant genera, and distribution maps, it also describes diagnostic characters, explores ant ecology and natural history, and includes a list of all currently recognized ant species in the regions. This detailed guide is an essential tool for entomologists and myrmecologists working with and learning about this diverse population of Formicidae.

Surf, Sand, and Stone

$24.95

Southern California is sandwiched between two tectonic plates with an ever-shifting boundary. Over the last several million years, movements of these plates have dramatically reshuffled the Earth’s crust to create rugged landscapes and seascapes riven with active faults. Movement along these faults triggers earthquakes and tsunamis, pushes up mountains, and lifts sections of coastline. Over geologic time, beaches come and go, coastal bluffs retreat, and the sea rises and falls. Nothing about Southern California’s coast is stable.

Surf, Sand, and Stone tells the scientific story of the Southern California coast: its mountains, islands, beaches, bluffs, surfing waves, earthquakes, and related phenomena. It takes readers from San Diego to Santa Barbara, revealing the evidence for how the coast's features came to be and how they are continually changing. With a compelling narrative and clear illustrations, Surf, Sand, and Stone outlines how the coast will be altered in the future and how we can best prepare for it.