Advances in Coastal Ecology - Processes, Patterns, and Services (Environmental Sciences)

Most of the world’s human population lives along the coast, where ecosystems are subject to the environmental degrading impacts brought by the increasing use of plastics, loss of coastal buffers from storms like mangrove forests, and decreasing biodiversity from which ecosystem services spring from. In many cases, as the effects of these changes become more widespread, regions lacking basic information, like the knowledge of what animals reside along a coastline, are being threatened. These developments occur on the complex backdrop of natural processes that shape the geological and sedimentary features of the shore. The clash of the timescales of these changes, short for human-mediated impacts and long for geological ones, creates thought-provoking contrasts and gives insight into what the future may hold for coastal ecosystems. This book presents current research exploring solutions, exposing effects, and describing biological and geological coastline features for the first time in understudied regions of the world. It is an essential text for libraries, classrooms where coastal ecology is taught, and the general readership interested in coastal ecosystems.