Minireviews: Exploring the Basic Ecological Unit: Ecosystem-like Concepts in Traditional Societies

Exploring the Basic Ecological Unit: Ecosystem-like Concepts in Traditional Societies

Ancient conceptualizations of ecosystems exist in several Amerindian, Asia-Pacific, European, and African cultures. The rediscovery by scientists of ecosystem-like concepts among traditional peoples has been important in the appreciation of traditional ecological knowledge among ecologists, anthropologists, and interdisciplinary scholars. Two key characteristics of these systems are that (a) th...

Exploring the Automatic Selection of Basic Level Concepts

We present a very simple method for selecting Base Level Concepts using basic structural properties of WordNet. We also empirically demonstrate that these automatically derived set of Base Level Concepts group senses into an adequate level of abstraction in order to perform class-based Word Sense Disambiguation. In fact a very naive Most Frequent classifier using the classes selected is able to...

Upgrading Marine Ecosystem Restoration Using Ecological‐Social Concepts

Conservation and environmental management are principal countermeasures to the degradation of marine ecosystems and their services. However, in many cases, current practices are insufficient to reverse ecosystem declines. We suggest that restoration ecology, the science underlying the concepts and tools needed to restore ecosystems, must be recognized as an integral element for marine conservat...

Ecological Drivers of Ecosystem Diversity in Sahelian Rangeland of Niger

Description of vegetation patterns associated with environmental factors such as grazing, climate, landforms, substrate variables etc. are helpful for land management planning. This study used new synecological tools to investigate plants composition and to provide ecological descriptions of plants communities of communal pastures in Sahelian Ecological Zone of Niger. Vegetation and several env...

The Significance of Traditional Islamic Art for the Life of Muslim Societies in the Modern World