Routledge Handbook of Wetlands

About this book

This handbook provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the place, value and significance of wetlands, presenting perspectives from across the environmental and social sciences.

Recent decades have witnessed unprecedented global interest in wetlands and the critical role they play in supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services such as carbon storage, flood mitigation, as well as their direct benefits for people and society that include the provision of food, clean water and a range of cultural services. This Routledge Handbook of Wetlands brings together a wide range of perspectives from social and environmental disciplines, and voices from different wetland stakeholders from the global north and south, to present an assessment of our current understanding of wetlands, their environmental significance, and their place in society and policy. A recurring theme of the book is an exploration of how our current knowledge of wetlands, that is often fragmented along traditional disciplinary lines, can be brought together to enable a more integrated, interdisciplinary and social-ecological conceptualisation that aligns more closely with real-world complex challenges, and which offers new directions in wetland management for sustainable development.

This handbook will be essential reading for students and scholars of wetland management, environmental science, water resource management, conservation ecology and sustainable development.

Contents

PART 1: INTRODUCTION
1. Introduction

PART 2: WETLANDS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
2. Wetlands, ecology and landscapes
3. Wetlands: hydrological processes and impacts
4. Wetland ecohydrology
5. Flooding in riverine landscapes and wetlands
6. Wetlands and climate change
7. Wetland soils
8. Biogeochemistry and nutrient cycling of wetlands
9. Biodiversity of wetlands and invertebrate communities
10. Carbon cycling in wetlands
11. Paleoecology as a means of understanding wetland change
12. Wetland plant zonation and succession
13. Wetlands and mammals
14. Wetlands and birds

PART 3: WETLANDS, PEOPLE AND SOCIETY
15. Wetland change in the Anthropocene: drivers and solutions
16. Wetlands, water and ecosystem services
17. Wetlands and culture
18. Wetland Archaeology: past, present and future
19. Wetlands and gastronomy
20. Wetlands and gender: unpacking a complex relationship
21. Wetlands and education
22. Wetlands: a blessing and a curse for human health
23. Wetlands and agriculture
24. Wetlands, property rights, and land tenure
25. Wetlands and fisheries
26. Wetlands and Palaeontology: a tool to promote rural development through education

PART 4: WETLAND ASSESSMENT AND MANAGEMENT
27. Remote sensing of wetlands
28. Wetlands, geographical information systems (GIS) and spatial modelling
29. Wetland ecosystem services assessment
30. Economic and financial tools for identifying, assessing and capturing wetland ecosystem values
31. Assessing the contribution of wetlands to the contemporary carbon budget and carbon markets
32. Wetlands and wastewater treatment
33. Wetlands in contemporary international policy discourses
34. Wetlands, policy and the state
35. Wetlands and landscape approaches
36. Wetland restoration and rewilding
37. Wetlands and social-ecological resilience

Customer Reviews

Biography

Alan Dixon is a Principal Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Science and the Environment at the University of Worcester, UK. He is the co-editor of Wetland Management and Sustainable Livelihoods in Africa (Routledge, 2013).

Ian Maddock is a Professor of River Science in the School of Science and the Environment at the University of Worcester, UK. He is the co-author of Ecohydraulics: An Integrated Approach (2013).