The Nature of Southeast Alaska: A Guide to Plants, Animals, and Habitats

by Richard Carstensen, Bob Armstrong, Rita M. O'Clair

Overview

Everything you ever wanted to know about the flora and fauna of Southeast Alaska is contained in the third edition of this lively field guide to the natural world, from bears to banana slugs, mountains to murrelets. Highlighting the most fascinating and unusual aspects of Southeast Alaska natural history, the book is also a guide to the most frequently seen plants and animals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780882409290
Publisher:	Graphic Arts Books
Publication date:	03/03/2014
Series:	Alaska Geographic
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	326
Sales rank:	241,419
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Richard Carstensen moved to Southeast Alaska in 1977. He works as a writer, nature illustrator, map maker, wilderness guide, environmental consultant, and instructor for the Discovery Foundation, a nonprofit organization teaching natural history to youth and educators of Southeast Alaska. He divides his time between the backyards of Juneau’s schools and the remote wilderness.
Bob Armstrong has pursued a career in Alaska as a biologist, naturalist, and nature photographer since 1960. He is the author of the best-selling book Guide to the Birds of Alaska and numerous other popular and scientific books and articles on the natural history of the state. From 1960 to 1984, he was a fishery biologist and research supervisor for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, an assistant leader for the Alaska Cooperative Fishery Research Unit, and Associate Professor of Fisheries at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Armstrong retired from the State of Alaska in 1984 to pursue broader interests in natural history and nature photography.
Since 1978, Rita M. O’Clair has taught a wide variety of biology courses at the University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau, where she is currently Associate Professor of Biology. She received a PhD in zoology from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1973. An honorary lifetime member of The Nature Conservancy, she belongs to numerous professional organizations. She has studied and photographed natural habitats around the world.

Read an Excerpt

The overriding and underlying theme of Southeast Alaska is water, and inescapable moisture is the unifying feature of nearly all its habitats. From whales’ permanent immersion to banana slugs’ damp haunts, all our plants and animals contend with water. Only when droughts shrivel the rest of North America do Southeast residents count their soggy blessings. Amount and distribution of water is the logical way to differentiate Southeast’s many natural habitats. These range from ocean, lakes, ponds, and rivers, to frequently submerged salt marshes and stream flood zones, to perennially saturated bogs and other freshwater wetlands, to the usually drenched rain forest and alpine tundra. After a rare two-week drought, it’s sometimes possible to sit in the forest understory without soaking our pants. Then rain resumes. Some habitats are defined by solidified water—glaciers and highcountry snowfields. The term “terrestrial” as applied to certain Southeast Alaskan habitats is somewhat generous; it actually means “occasionally free of water.” The Pacific rain forest—Southeast Alaska is a geographic unit defined by the open Pacific Ocean on the west and the boundary with Canada on the north, east, and south. In some cases the lines on maps are ecologically as well as politically significant. For example, if you climb eastward over the crest of the Coast Range into British Columbia (an expeditionary venture!), you enter more than just a different nation. Precipitation declines suddenly in the mountains’ rainshadow. Flora and fauna are dramatically different. You’ve crossed a border in every sense of the word.

Table of Contents

Extending the ABC-Miner Bayesian Classification Algorithm.- A Multiple Pheromone Ant Clustering Algorithm.- An Island Memetic Differential Evolution Algorithm for the Feature Selection Problem.- Using a Scouting Predator-Prey Optimizer to Train Support Vector Machines with non PSD Kernels.- Response Surfaces with Discounted Information for Global Optima Tracking in Dynamic Environments.- Fitness based Self Adaptive Differential.- Adaptation schemes and dynamic optimization problems: a basic study on the Adaptive Hill Climbing Memetic Algorithm.- Using base position errors in an entropy-based evaluation function for the study of genetic code adaptability.- An Adaptive Multi-Crossover Population Algorithm for Solving Routing Problems.- Corner Based Many-Objective Optimization.- Escaping Local Optima via Parallelization and.- An Improved Genetic Based Keyword Extraction Technique.- Part-of-Speech Tagging Using Evolutionary Computation.- A Cooperative approach using ants and bees for the graph coloring problem.- Artificial Bee Colony Training of Neural Networks.- Nonlinar optimization in landscapes with planar regions.- Optimizing Neighbourhood Distances for a Variant of Fully-Informed Particle Swarm Algorithm.- Meta Morphic Particle Swarm Optimization.- Empirical study of computational intelligence strategies for biochemical systems modelling.- Metachronal waves in Cellular Automata: Cilia-like manipulation in actuator arrays.- Team of A-Teams Approach for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows.- Self-adaptable Group Formation of Reconfigurable Agents in Dynamic Environments.- A Choice Function Hyper-Heuristic for the Winner Determination Problem.- Automatic Generation of Heuristics for Constraint Satisfaction Problems.- Branching Schemes and Variable Ordering Heuristics for Constraint Satisfaction Problems: Is there Something to Learn.- Nash Equilibria Detection for Discrete-time Generalized Cournot Dynamic Oligopolies.