Nature

"These surprisingly beautiful images of growth and decay are like a meditation, an invitation to consider transience and joy." --Harper's Bazaar

Photographer Johanna Neurath visited Columbia Road Market in London nearly every Sunday for ten years. Rather than depicting the obvious prettiness of people and their flowers Neurath turns her attention to the colors and patterns left behind as the market clears out. This book fuses still life and street photography and reminds us that beauty is often to be found in the most unexpected places.

Johanna Neurath is Design Director at Thames & Hudson. A self-confessed image junkie, type nerd, and bibliophile, Neurath has worked in publishing for more than twenty-five years as a book designer, picture editor, typographer, and commissioning editor.

"An eye-opening and enchanting book by one of our major scientist-explorers." --Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wife

Nicknamed the "Real-Life Lorax" by National Geographic, the biologist, botanist, and conservationist Meg Lowman--aka "CanopyMeg"--takes us on an adventure into the "eighth continent" of the world's treetops, along her journey as a tree scientist, and into climate action

Welcome to the eighth continent!

As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn't monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees.

Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world's foremost arbornauts, known as the "real-life Lorax." She planned one of the first treetop walkways and helps create more of these bridges through the eighth continent all over the world.

With a voice as infectious in its enthusiasm as it is practical in its optimism, The Arbornaut chronicles Lowman's irresistible story. From climbing solo hundreds of feet into the air in Australia's rainforests to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States, from searching the redwoods of the Pacific coast for new life to studying leaf eaters in Scotland's Highlands, from conducting a BioBlitz in Malaysia to conservation planning in India and collaborating with priests to save Ethiopia's last forests, Lowman launches us into the life and work of a field scientist, ecologist, and conservationist. She offers hope, specific plans, and recommendations for action; despite devastation across the world, through trees, we can still make an immediate and lasting impact against climate change.

A blend of memoir and fieldwork account, The Arbornaut gives us the chance to live among scientists and travel the world--even in a hot-air balloon! It is the engrossing, uplifting story of a nerdy tree climber--the only girl at the science fair--who becomes a giant inspiration, a groundbreaking, ground-defying field biologist, and a hero for trees everywhere.

Includes black-and-white illustrations

Nests--among the most amazing dwelling places in the entire animal kingdom. Few creatures craft such brilliant and involved homes as birds do. From holes drilled into trees to intricately woven cups, these magnificent structures are worthy of our admiration. This book by Stan Tekiela is filled with unparalleled photography, and it promises to delight as it walks you through the world of bird nests.

Book Features

Welcome to your bird watching journal, a comprehensive place to record your sightings and experiences, and to keep notes for the future.

Birding Logs include guided prompts to track key information such as each bird's name, colors and markings, habitat, and behavior, as well as your current location and weather. Blank pages provide space for sketches, lists, and additional notes.

The final section, Birding Checklists, gives you a place to track backyard birds local to you, a wish list of birds you hope to spot one day, and destinations you want to travel to for bird watching.

DELUXE JOURNAL Rounded corners, ribbon bookmark, elastic-band closure, elastic pen loop, inside pocket for convenient storage, and high-quality paper that ink won't bleed through.

SPECIALIZED PAGES This guided journal gives the writer places to record their bird sightings, with specialized details including weather, season, habitat, behavior, colors and markings, as well as space for sketches and other notes.

LIGHTWEIGHT AND PORTABLE: Fits easily into a backpack or glove box, allowing for quick access for notes on the go.

For all of his achievements, Kumlien never gained the widespread notoriety of Wisconsin naturalists John Muir, Increase Lapham, or Aldo Leopold. Kumlien did his work behind the scenes, content to spend his days in the marshes and swamps rather than in the public eye. He once wrote that he was not "cut out for pretensions and show in the world." Yet, his detailed observations of Wisconsin's natural world--including the impact of early agriculture on the environment--were hugely important to the fields of ornithology and botany. As this carefully researched and lovingly rendered biography proves, Thure Kumlien deserves to be remembered as one of Wisconsin's most influential naturalists.

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Our Earth is more beautiful and more diverse than we can possibly conceive of.

The Book of Vanishing Species is a stunning homage to the planet's most mysterious, bizarre and wondrous creatures and plants. Their stories are captivating, from the eyeless and tiny dragonlike olm to the hawksbill turtle, whose gender will be determined by the temperature of the sand it is born in. These species may have survived for hundreds of thousands of years by cleverly adapting to their environments, but their future remains far from certain.

The book brings to life red cranes as they dance and bow for the sheer joy of movement, trees that breathe out a haze of misty atmosphere for insects that only feast on one kind of flower, a deep-ocean snail quietly building its shell from iron... and each one of them is illuminated with an exquisite illustration. As you turn the pages, there emerges a network of life that stretches across and around the planet in a dazzling web of existence.

This is both a love letter to life on Earth, and an urgent summons to protect what is precious and lovely in this world.

A marine biologist vividly brings alive the extraordinary ecosystem of the deep ocean--a realm about which we know less than we do about the Moon--and shows how protecting rather than exploiting it will benefit mankind.

"The oceans have always shaped human lives," writes marine biologist Helen Scales in her vibrant new book The Brilliant Abyss, but the surface and the very edges have so far mattered the most. "However, one way or another, the future ocean is the deep ocean."

A golden era of deep-sea discovery is underway. Revolutionary studies in the deep are rewriting the very notion of life on Earth and the rules of what is possible. In the process, the abyss is being revealed as perhaps the most amazing part of our planet, with a topography even more varied and extreme than its Earthbound counterpart. Teeming with unsuspected life, an extraordinary interconnected ecosystem deep below the waves has a huge effect on our daily lives, influencing climate and weather systems, with the potential for much more--good or bad depending on how it is exploited. Currently the fantastic creatures that live in the deep--many of them incandescent in a world without light--and its formations capture and trap vast quantities of carbon that would otherwise poison our atmosphere; and novel bacteria as yet undiscovered hold the promise of potent new medicines. Yet the deep also holds huge mineral riches lusted after by many nations and corporations; mining them could ultimately devastate the planet, compounded by the deepening impacts of ubiquitous pollutants and rampant overfishing.

Eloquently and passionately, Helen Scales brings to life the majesty and mystery of an alien realm that nonetheless sustains us, while urgently making clear the price we could pay if it is further disrupted. The Brilliant Abyss is at once a revelation and a clarion call to preserve this vast unseen world.

Dahlias are the showboats of the flower world--colorful, flamboyant, and spectacular. They're also one of the most satisfying flowers to grow, with a long season, plentiful blooms, and adaptable to most climates with proper care. They're very easy to propagate, and can be hybridized. There are numerous dahlia flower forms and more than 50,000 recognized cultivars! This charming little hardcover book includes 60+ full-color botanical illustrations, basic botany and history, everything you need to know to grow gorgeous blooms in the garden, as well as dividing tubers to propagate more flowers, tips for creating beautiful arrangements and preserving flowers, quotes, lore, and notable gardens and growers. Like a bouquet of dahlias, this book is an affordable little luxury for gardeners and flower lovers --the perfect hostess gift or mother's day present. Perfect for flower fans, this little love letter to the dahlia is bursting with tips, tricks and facts.

How much light is too much light? Satellite pictures show our planet as a brightly glowing orb, and in our era of constant illumination, light pollution has become a major issue. The world's flora and fauna have evolved to operate in the natural cycle of day and night. But in the last 150 years, we have extended our day--and in doing so have forced out the inhabitants of the night and disrupted the circadian rhythms necessary to sustain all living things, including ourselves.

In this persuasive, well-researched book, Swedish conservationist Johan Eklöf urges us to appreciate natural darkness, its creatures, and its unique benefits. Eklöf ponders the beauties of the night sky, traces the errant paths of light-drunk moths and the swift dives of keen-eyed owls, and shows us the bioluminescent creatures of the deepest oceans. As a devoted friend of the night, he writes passionately about the startling damage we inflict on ourselves and our fellow creatures simply by keeping the lights on.

The Darkness Manifesto depicts the domino effect of diminishing darkness: insects, dumbfounded by streetlamps, failing to reproduce; birds blinded and bewildered by artificial lights; and bats starving as they wait in vain for food insects that only come out in the dark of night. For humans, light-induced sleep disturbances impact our hormones and weight, and can contribute to mental health problems like chronic stress and depression. The streetlamps, floodlights, and neon signs of cities are altering entire ecosystems, and scientists are only just beginning to understand the long-term effects. The light bulb--long the symbol of progress and development--needs to be turned off.

Educational, eye-opening, and ultimately encouraging, The Darkness Manifesto outlines simple steps that we can take to benefit ourselves and the planet. In order to ensure a bright future, we must embrace the darkness.

Packed with more than seven hundred full-color illustrations, this definitive pocket guide paints a vivid portrait of extraordinary dinosaurs and prehistoric animals, and the ecosystems they lived in millions of years ago.

This guide features authoritative text, crystal-clear illustrations, and a straightforward approach to revealing the fascinating lives and habitats of dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and prehistoric beasts. The introductory section explains classification systems, geological timelines, the evolution of the dinosaurs, and how fossils form and are discovered by paleontologists. For ease of reference, the main body of the book is divided into three sections: the Precambrian and Paleozoic eras, when animals first began evolving; the Mesozoic era, which saw the flourishing and eventual extinction of the dinosaurs; and the Cenozoic era, when giant mammals walked the Earth. Each section is broken down into its geological time periods, and, within these, the species are organized according to habitat--whether they lived on land, in the water, or in the air.

There are detailed profiles of 200 dinosaurs and other ancestors of modern animals. Each entry combines a precise, jargon-free description with full-color illustrations, skeletons, and replica models, annotated to showcase the unique features of the species. Maps show where each animal's fossils have been found, and many profiles are supported by photographs to show actual excavation sites.