Books published by The Blackburn Press

This book was written 30 years ago as the first synthesis of European and Anglo-American methods in vegetation ecology. Upon its publication in 1974, it rapidly became the standard text for the study of vegetation in over 60 US colleges and universities. An unsolicited review appeared in Ecology 56: 1233 (1975) with the title "Getting It All Together in Plant Synecology." The book also received wide international acceptance. "In his foreword to the 1974 edition, Raymond Fosberg referred to this book as 'by far the best work of its scope that I know.' It is still agreed that there is no comparable work. It was used as the only textbook for the first twenty offerings of one graduate course. For the past dozen years it's been moved to the recommended list because it has been out of print. There have been several vegetation science textbooks published since 1974, but their foci have been on ordination and multivariate data analysis instead of on sampling methods. No other text has covered the subject of vegetation sampling design in such depth, breadth, and impartiality as this book, Aims and Methods of Vegetation Ecology. Most of this material remains as current and topical today as it was a quarter of a century ago, because the progress that has been made in vegetation science is in the computer-based treatment of sample data, not in the creation of new sampling protocols.A new generation of vegetation ecologists can now have the same advantage - the same easy access to this classic reference work - that a past generation had in quantifying and summarizing the formidable complexity of natural, wildland vegetation." Foreword by Michael G. Barbour, Plant Ecologist, University of California at Davis, Department of Environmental Horticulture, November 2002.

This manual brings together information on all phases of seed handling and presents the results of more than 20 years of studies. Forest Service field personnel at several experiment stations and regional offices furnished a backlog of source material for treatments of individual genera.The manual consists of two main parts. Part 1 formulates general principles on the various phases of seed handling from formation of the seed to sowing. Part 2, which forms the larger part of the manual, provides relatively detailed but concise information for 444 species and varieties of trees and shrubs; this includes data on distribution and use, discussions of seeding habits, methods of seed collection, extraction and storage, seed germination, and nursery and field practice.

This textbook, originally published in 1970, is a classic in the field of Population Genetics. It presents the field of population genetics, starting with elementary concepts and leading the reader well into the field. It is concerned mainly with population genetics in a strict sense and deals primarily with natural populations and less fully with the rather similar problems that arise in breading livestock and cultivated plans. The emphasis is on the behavior of genes and population attributes under natural selection where the most important measure is Darwinian fitness. This text is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in genetics and population biologyThis book steers a middle course between completely verbal biological arguments and the rigor of the mathematician. The first two-thirds of the book do not require advanced mathematical background. An ordinary knowledge of calculus will suffice. The latter parts of the book, which deal with population stochastically, use more advanced methods. Chapter Titles:1. Models of population growth.2. Randomly mating populations.3. Inbreeding.4. Correlation between relatives and assertive mating.5. Selection.6. Populations in approximate equilibrium.7. Properties of a finite population.8. Stochastic processes in the change of gene frequencies.9. Distribution of gene frequencies in populations.Appendix. Some statistical and mathematical methods frequently used in population genetics.Bibliography.Glossary.Index.

This work touches on the specialized world of wooden-ship building, looking at the endless variations of techniques from country to country, region to region, and over the course of history.