i never would have gotten an 'A' on my Sea Star report in Advanced Biology if it weren't for this book. Easy acces to what you need, the info you need, and great pictures!

I bought this book when I visited the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum. It was nice and short to read, with a variety of topics covered. I really enjoyed it, and the pictures were great too.

I found this book to be a great help identifying plants in the field. Most can be identified without magnification. Plants are identified using dichotomous keys.

I also use The Jepson Manual, Higher Plants of California and the old Munz's. But both are heavy and difficult to use in the field for many of the genera though I did use them when I got home to check my identifications. The second great feature of this book is that the plants are specific to the area that I was traveling through. I didn't have to separate out plants that only live in the desert or at the coast. Eliminating that many choices made the effort much easier.

I recommend the book heartily, understanding the plants and animals around us greatly enhances the experience of enjoying nature.

Many of the plants that I found can be seen at californiagardens.com

I recommend this book to all persons interested in lions in the America's. It will appeal to and educate people with diverse opinions on the management of this wonderful species of cat. Mr. Shaw is not only a good biologist, he also tells it like it is, and in a well written way. I especially hope that North America's wildlife decision makers will read and heed Mr. Shaw's conclusions about lion management. This book is for the biologist, the rancher, the lion hunter, and the preservationist.

Produced by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology as a companion to a field guide, this remarkable two-CD set is unlike any other nature guide yet published. It is an audio guide to mammals, and only mammals, of the rainforests of the New World.

As the hot spots of the world's bioversity, rainforests have gotten lots of attention from naturalists and adventurous eco-tourists, who want to explore these green worlds for themselves. There have been countless field guides (both printed and audio) to birds in various parts of the New World tropics, but this audio guide exposes the voices of rainforest mammals, many of them retiring and rarely seen in the thick foliage, for study and appreciation.

The first disc is brief (about 40 minutes), but sound recordings of a lot of these mammals are not easily obtained. Over 50 species give voice to their unique sounds. Opossums snort and grunt, jaguars make a sound like someone sawing on a log, tapirs whistle like birds. There is even a recording of a river dolphin spouting, the sudden explosive noise almost out of place among the other jungle sounds.

The second disc, longer in length, features the most vocal of the rainforest mammals, the primates. Some of these produce sounds that could easily be mistaken for the sounds of other creatures. For example, some of the smaller monkeys, like the tamarins, produces squeaks and chitters that are surprisingly birdlike. The night monkey, calling after dark when it would probably never be seen, hoots exactly like an owl. The loudest of the rainforest monkeys, the howlers, produce roars of such intensity that they will literally frighten anyone who visits the rainforest but does not know that these are the sounds of harmless vegetarians.

"Sounds of Neotropical Rainforest Mammals" is off the beaten track, to be sure, but if you are traveling to the tropics anytime soon, I strongly recommend it. Even if you're not, I recommend it anyway. You haven't really lived until you've startled your neighbors with the loud, cackling chorus of the dusky titi monkey.

This book helped me to learn about different dinosaurs when I was a child and would recomend this book to parent of young children. This book is easy to read and also easy to understand because it uses language and relates things in a way children can comprehend them.

Collaborative written by ecologists Colbert E. Cushing (Colorado State University) and J. David Allen (University of Michigan), Streams: Their Ecology And Life is a superbly presented field guide packed with beautiful color photography, sketches, charts, graphs, and an authoritative text introducing readers of all backgrounds to the diverse, rich and fascinating splendor of streams and the chains of natural life that form around them. From the different types of rivers to the variety of different creatures that inhabit them and the surrounding area - birds, fish, crustaceans, amphibians, insects and more - Streams: Their Ecology And Life is packed cover to cover with an incredible amount of solid information and highly recommended for personal, school, and community library environmental studies and reference collections.

A must read for people interested in the environment and how to interpret their surroundings. Beautifully written, thoughtful and intelligent. One of the best books I've read.

By explaining the inter-connectedness of all things David Suzuki, best known for the TV show The Nature of Things, gives us not only an introductory ecological education but tells us why we should be concerned about the future. Suzuki says, "My primary concern continues to be to convince people that there is a real crisis affecting all of us and that every minute we continue to deny or ignore it, the fewer options we will have and the harder it will be to make the changes needed to bring us back into balance with the factors that sustain our lives." Much of the information given will be familiar to well-informed environmentalists, but it has been put together in an easy to read book that even a teenager would enjoy reading. And this is just the type of information that teenagers and the rest of us need if we are to make good decisions about our future. Another Suzuki quote, "Until everyone takes it for granted that the real 'bottom line' for survival and the quality of life is not economics but the state of air, water, soil, and biological diversity, we will continue to perceive the 'environment' as an issue that must compete with other pressing matters." If you are the type that likes to mark the especially good quotes in a book, than you better have a couple extra highlighters when you read this one.

It is a lovely addition to a collection of coffee table books