Academic literature on the topic 'Vegetation and climate South Australia Far North Region'

Abstract. Climates at the Last Glacial Maximum have been inferred from fossil pollen assemblages, but these inferred climates are colder for eastern North America than those produced by climate simulations. It has been suggested that low CO2 levels could account for this discrepancy. In this study biogeographic evidence is used to test the CO2 effect model. The recolonization of glaciated zones in eastern North America following the last ice age produced distinct biogeographic patterns. It has been assumed that a wide zone south of the ice was tundra or boreal parkland (Boreal-Parkland Zone or BPZ), which would have been recolonized from southern refugia as the ice melted, but the patterns in this zone differ from those in the glaciated zone, which creates a major biogeographic anomaly. In the glacial zone, there are few endemics but in the BPZ there are many across multiple taxa. In the glacial zone, there are the expected gradients of genetic diversity with distance from the ice-free zone, but no evidence of this is found in the BPZ. Many races and related species exist in the BPZ which would have merged or hybridized if confined to the same refugia. Evidence for distinct southern refugia for most temperate species is lacking. Extinctions of temperate flora were rare. The interpretation of spruce as a boreal climate indicator may be mistaken over much of the region if the spruce was actually an extinct temperate species. All of these anomalies call into question the concept that climates in the zone south of the ice were extremely cold or that temperate species had to migrate far to the south. An alternate hypothesis is that low CO2 levels gave an advantage to pine and spruce, which are the dominant trees in the BPZ, and to herbaceous species over trees, which also fits the observed pattern. Thus climate reconstruction from pollen data is probably biased and needs to incorporate CO2 effects. Most temperate species could have survived across their current ranges at lower abundance by retreating to moist microsites. These would be microrefugia not easily detected by pollen records, especially if most species became rare. These results mean that climate reconstructions based on terrestrial plant indicators will not be valid for periods with markedly different CO2 levels.

Abstract. Climates at the Last Glacial Maximum have been inferred from fossil pollen assemblages, but these inferred climates are colder than those produced by climate simulations. Biogeographic evidence also argues against these inferred cold climates. The recolonization of glaciated zones in eastern North America following the last ice age produced distinct biogeographic patterns. It has been assumed that a wide zone south of the ice was tundra or boreal parkland (Boreal-Parkland Zone or BPZ), which would have been recolonized from southern refugia as the ice melted, but the patterns in this zone differ from those in the glaciated zone, which creates a major biogeographic anomaly. In the glacial zone, there are few endemics but in the BPZ there are many across multiple taxa. In the glacial zone, there are the expected gradients of genetic diversity with distance from the ice-free zone, but no evidence of this is found in the BPZ. Many races and related species exist in the BPZ which would have merged or hybridized if confined to the same refugia. Evidence for distinct southern refugia for most temperate species is lacking. Extinctions of temperate flora were rare. The interpretation of spruce as a boreal climate indicator may be mistaken over much of the region if the spruce was actually an extinct temperate species. All of these anomalies call into question the concept that climates in the zone south of the ice were very cold or that temperate species had to migrate far to the south. Similar anomalies exist in Europe and on tropical mountains. An alternate hypothesis is that low CO2 levels gave an advantage to pine and spruce, which are the dominant trees in the BPZ, and to herbaceous species over trees, which also fits the observed pattern. Most temperate species could have survived across their current ranges at lower abundance by retreating to moist microsites. These would be microrefugia not easily detected by pollen records, especially if most species became rare. These results mean that climate reconstruction based on terrestrial plant indicators will not be valid for periods with markedly different CO2 levels.

Coastal floodplains are among the most modified landscapes in southeastern Australia. We used available vegetation survey data for coastal alluvium and other unconsolidated Quarternary sediments to construct a diagnosis of the major plant communities and document their flora. We used soil landscape maps and historical portion plans to gain an understanding of the distribution and environmental relationships of the communities. The flora of coastal floodplains includes more than 1 000 native vascular plant taxa and more than 200 introduced taxa. The introduced flora is likely to be considerably larger, given that sampling was biased toward the least disturbed sites. Six major plant communities were diagnosed including a rainforest found north from the Shoalhaven floodplain, a mixed forest of eucalypts and melaleucas found north from Jervis Bay, a casuarina forest (sometimes with melaleuca) found throughout the coast, one open eucalypt forest found principally south from the Hunter region, another open eucalypt forest found north of the Hunter region and a complex of treeless wetland assemblages scattered throughout the coast. The extent and spatial arrangement of these communities varies between floodplains, with landform, rainfall, water regime and soil properties including moisture, fertility and salinity thought to be important factors mediating their distribution patterns. All six assemblages are listed as Endangered Ecological Communities under Threatened Species legislation. The coastal floodplain communities continue to be threatened by land clearing and crop conversion, fragmentation, changes to water flows, flooding and drainage, input of polluted runoff, weed invasion, activation of acid sulphate soils, climate change and degradation through rubbish dumping and other physical disturbances.

Specimens of Phebalium glandulosum Hook. subsp. glandulosum representing the entire geographic range of the subspecies were examined for morphological and anatomical variation. Phenetic patterns were identified with the pattern analysis package PATN, and three distinct groups were identified. One group consists of plants from inland areas of New South Wales, north-western Victoria, and the Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas of South Australia; a second group consists of plants collected from alongside the Snowy River in eastern Victoria and south-eastern New South Wales; and a third group consists of plants from Queensland and northern New South Wales. The climate analysis program BIOCLIM was used to compare climate variables across the geographic range, and showed clear climatic separation in support of the phenetic analysis. The three groups are formally recognised here as distinct subspecies. Plants from Queensland and the Bourke region of northern New South Wales belong to the typical subspecies; plants from north-western Victoria, central New South Wales, and the Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas of South Australia form a cohesive assemblage and are recognised as a new subspecies P. glandulosum subsp. macrocalyx; and plants from the Snowy River in far eastern Victoria and the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales form a distinct and isolated group recognised as a new subspecies P. glandulosum subsp. riparium. These new subspecies are formally described, and an identification key and summaries distinguishing all six subspecies of P. glandulosum are presented.

Background: Simultaneous measurements of air temperature were carried out using automatic weather stations at 14 tropical locations in Nigeria. Diurnal variations were derived from the 5-minute update cycle initial data for the years ranging between 2007 and 2013. The temperature trends in Nigeria revealed a continuous variability that is seasonally dependent within any particular year considered. Method: The analysis was carried out using available data from the network and the results are presented with a focus to characterize the temperature variations at different locations in the country using the mean, maximum and minimum temperatures from the north which is arid in nature to the south, which is a tropical monsoon climate type and a coastal region. Result: In overall, temperature variations in Nigeria were observed to have higher values in the far north, attributed to the influence of Sahara Desert, which has less cloud cover and therefore is more transparent to solar irradiance and lowers values in the south, where there are more cloud cover and abundant vegetation. Conclusion: Measured maximum and minimum temperatures in Nigeria are respectively 43.1°C at Yola (north-east part of Nigeria) and 10.2°C for Jos (north-central part of Nigeria). The least temperature variations were recorded for stations in the southern part of the country, while the largest variations were recorded in the north-central region of the country.

Abstract A “perfect model” configuration with a global coupled climate model 30-member ensemble is used to address decadal prediction of Pacific SSTs. All model data are low-pass filtered to focus on the low-frequency decadal component. The first three EOFs in the twentieth-century simulation, representing nearly 80% of the total variance, are used as the basis for early twenty-first-century predictions. The first two EOFs represent the forced trend and the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO), respectively, as noted in previous studies, and the third has elements of both trend and IPO patterns. The perfect model reference simulation, the target for the prediction, is taken as the experiment that ran continuously from the twentieth to twenty-first century using anthropogenic and natural forcings for the twentieth century and the A1B scenario for the twenty-first century. The other 29 members use a perturbation in the atmosphere at year 2000 and are run until 2061. Since the IPO has been recognized as a dominant contributor to decadal variability in the Pacific, information late in the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first century is used to select a subset of ensemble members that are more skillful in tracking the time evolution of the IPO (EOF2) in relation to a notional start date of 2010. Predictions for the 19-yr period centered on the year 2020 use that subset of ensemble members to construct Pacific SST patterns based on the predicted evolution of the first three EOFs. Compared to the perfect model reference simulation, the predictions show some skill for Pacific SST predictions with anomaly pattern correlations greater than +0.5. An application of the Pacific SST prediction is made to precipitation over North America and Australia. Even though there are additional far-field influences on Pacific SSTs and North American and Australian precipitation involving the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO) in the Atlantic, and Indian Ocean and South Asian monsoon variability, there is qualitative skill for the pattern of predicted precipitation over North America and Australia using predicted Pacific SSTs. This exercise shows that, in the presence of a large forced trend like that in the large ensemble, much of Pacific region decadal predictability about 20 years into the future arises from increasing greenhouse gases.

Australian sites that are claimed to preserve evidence of fossil spores and pollen for Late Neogene (Late Miocene, Pliocene) climates, mostly lack one or both of the prerequisites, i.e. accurate dating and continuous preservation of plant microfossils. Nevertheless, the available data confirm that climatic gradients closely parallelled those of the present day in direction although not in strength: broad-scale vegetation successions are ecologically consistent with long-term cooling and (middle to high latitudes) drying trends in global climate. Although it is rarely possible to establish precise meteorological values for the individual sites along these gradients, climatic envelopes can be estimated for many localities. For example, during the Late Miocene–Pliocene, mean annual precipitation along the northern margin appear to range from 600 mm to 1500 mm in the Kimberley region of north-western Western Australia to above 2000–3000 mm on the Atherton Tableland, north-eastern Queensland. If these and other estimates are correct, then environments along the northern margin show only gradual (unidirectional?) change or did not fall below biologically critical thresholds during the Late Miocene and Early Pliocene but began to approach modern values during Late Pliocene time. Whether the observation implies that meteorological controls at this time were similar to modern synoptic scale systems is unknown. Climates along the southern margin were more labile. For example, there is unequivocal evidence that Early Pliocene climates in the Bass Strait region were effectively more humid and warmer than at present, possibly resembling conditions now found on the northern New South Wales and southern Queensland coast. This phase was preceded (weak evidence) and succeeded (strong evidence) by less temperate conditions during the Late Miocene and Late Pliocene respectively. Forcing factors appear to include changes in relative sea level, orographic effects and, speculatively, remote events such as the isolation and reconnection of the Mediterranean Sea to the world ocean. One promising direction for future research is provided by a recently located onshore basin in Western Australia which preserves an extraordinarily long (100 m), detailed sequence of Late Neogene palynofloras.

Despite beetles (Coleoptera) representing most existing animal species, the ecological and biogeographical factors shaping their distribution are still unclear in many regions. We implemented state-of-the-art ecological niche models (ENMs) and niche overlap analysis to investigate climate–occurrence patterns for five flea beetle species of the genus Chaetocnema in South Africa (C. brincki, C. danielssoni, C. darwini, C. gahani, and C. natalensis). ENMs were fitted through Maxent and Random Forests, testing various parameterizations. For each species, tuned ENMs attaining good discrimination on spatially independent test data were selected to predict suitability across the study region and individuate its main climatic drivers. Percentage coverage of climatically suitable areas by seventeen Afrotropical vegetation formations was also computed. Predicted suitable areas do not extend far away from known presence localities, except for C. brincki and C. gahani in north-eastern South Africa. Temperate grasslands and shrublands cover most of suitable areas for C. brincki and C. gahani, along with warm temperate forests, as well as for C. danielssoni, in this case being followed by tropical flooded and swamp forests. Climatic suitability for C. darwini mainly relates to the Mediterranean grasslands and scrublands of the southern coastal region, while suitable areas for C. natalensis encompass various vegetation formations, coherently with its wide distribution. The environmental niche of C. danielssoni significantly overlaps with those of the wide-ranging C. darwini and C. natalensis, suggesting that historical factors, rather than low climatic tolerance, has determined its restricted distribution in the Western Cape Province. Maxent and Random Forests were confirmed to be of great help in disentangling the environment–occurrence relationships and in predicting suitability for the target species outside their known range, but they need to be properly tuned to perform at their best.

The Norsky State Nature Reserve is located in Selemdzhinsky district of the Amurskaya oblast. Its area is 211 168 ha. Currently the flora of the Norsky Nature Reserve is studied in details. A species list has been published and an analysis of the flora has been made (Starchenko, Chuvasheva, 1993; Veklich, 2009). The vegetation cover is poorly studied; so far no geobotanical map of the Reserve has been compiled. Only the overview map (scale 1 : 2 500 000) of the vegetation of the Amur basin (1969) gives an idea of the vegetation as a whole. The climatic characteristics of the territory and the complex relief determine the diversity of plant habitats and their communities. The climate of the Norsky Reserve is continental with monsoon features and even ultracontinental (after A. I. Kaigorodov (1955). The modern relief of the Reserve includes wide floodplains of Nora and Selemdzha rivers, accumulative delta-terraces plain, Norskaya accumulative denudation plain (Geomorphologiya..., 1973) and hills. According to the latest botanical and geographical zoning of the Amurskaya oblast, the Norsky Reserve belongs to the Mamynskiy and Ulmsko-Aldikonskiy districts of the Turan-Mamyn province of the Manchurian subdistrict of the East Asian area (Borisova,Starchenko, 2018). The province belongs to southern taiga with some elements of nemoral forests (Quercus mongolica, Tilia amurensis and etc.) along the valleys of Selemdzha River and its major tributaries. The southern taiga includes different larch forests (often disturbed), derived birch-larch forests with Pinus sylvestris, Picea ajanensis and Abies nephrolepis. The presence of nemoral species in forest cenoses increases in the direction from north to south. A province peculiarity is the wide distribution of larch peatmoss forests, swamps and wet meadows. The scientific-reference typological map of vegetation on a medium scale (1 : 300 000) was compiled for the Norsky Nature Reserve for the first time. It shows spatial patterns of vegetation distribution in connection with the natural features of the territory (Fig. 5). The vegetation map legend is based on an ecologic and phytocoenotic classification. A zonal distribution of plant communities is presented in the legend. Plant communities are divided into some categories: dark-coniferous, light-coniferous and derived forests, which are represented as formations. The main cartographic units are groups of associations and their various combinations. The legend shows the vegetation of floodplains, rocks, and disturbed areas. Vegetation divisions are represented on the vegetation map by seventeen colors and one extra scale sign. All symbols have their own serial number, which is marked in the map legend. The largest areas on the territory of the Reserve are occupied by larch forests — 42 % (Fig. 6). The forested territory as a whole occupies 36.5 %, of which the largest areas are rhododendron larch (9.7 %) and floodplain (9.5 %) forests. Ledum larch and moss-shrub forests occupy 5.7 %. Larch mixed-grass-shrub forests cover some small areas (2.0 %). Sub-taiga larch forests with nemoral grasses and often with oak and black birch trees occupy 0.6 %. Pine and larch-pine forests extend 1.3 % of the Reserve’s area. Fir-spruce forests on watersheds have limited distribution — about 1 %. They are a chain of ecologic-dynamic series on floodplain occupying 2.7 % of the Reserve’s area. To conclude, the vegetation cover of the Norsky Nature Reserve reflects the zonal and provincial features of the territory.

Water is a principal medium of exchange within communities facing changing climate patterns and the ‘new dry’. For some parts of the globe water has been taken-for-granted, uncontested, yet for others highly variable, scarce and a measure of global and national inequalities. Australia as a large and diverse landmass is emblematic of those varied water contexts, yet as a whole, and after the recent ‘100-year drought’, water has become heavily regulated and marketised, and its material and symbolic meanings transformed. This has led us to ask: “What happens when water becomes marked or recognised as a scarce resource for all, indeed a site of contest and potential human conflict? How do the attempts to control water, through its market currency and environmental value, change the character of communities, the identities and interpersonal relationships that constitute the regional context?” After all, water is about far more than a material resource, it is also a cultural medium that is implicated the most fundamental aspects of life. In this study we explore the ways in which South Australian's living in the arid north of the state, above the Goyder Line, live and identify through the changing relations of water. Those changing relations are the changing availability and governance of water, nested within an ever-present public concern about climate change. We draw upon interviews with settler community members from a 200 square kilometre region across 7 towns or stations. Alongside the growing dry has been the developing commodification of water, having the effect of reducing local autonomy in the management and decision making about water conservation, supply and use. This paper considers the ways that these changes have transformative effects upon the differences and solidarities within local community relations.

Accompanying CD-ROM inside back cover, includes Appendices. Bibliography: leaves 242-266. This thesis examines the effects on vegetation at selected sites in northern South Australia of excluding various herbivores over a four and a half year period and of two intense but controlled grazing pulses over a six month period followed by an 18 month recovery period in a dune-swale land system. These changes are compared with changes recorded over an 11-year period at the Olympic Dam mine site. It found that short-term changes in vegetation revealed by ordination of periodical cover, density and species richness, are attributable to the periodicity of rainfall and that, under present grazing regimes, rainfall effects override grazing effects. Differences between the effects of sheep and cattle hoof damage are worthy of further investigation, as is the impact of kangaroo grazing. These two factors may have important implications for the management of Australian rangelands. System requirements for accompanying CD-ROM: IBM compatible computer with Pentium processor or higher and Windows 95, 98 or NT ; 4 MB or RAM. Other software: Acrobat Adobe Reader.

Accompanying CD-ROM inside back cover, includes Appendices.
Bibliography: leaves 242-266.
System requirements for accompanying CD-ROM: IBM compatible computer with Pentium processor or higher and Windows 95, 98 or NT ; 4 MB or RAM. Other software: Acrobat Adobe Reader.
xv, 266 p. : maps, charts ; 30 cm. + 1 CD-ROM (4 3/4 in.)
This thesis examines the effects on vegetation at selected sites in northern South Australia of excluding various herbivores over a four and a half year period and of two intense but controlled grazing pulses over a six month period followed by an 18 month recovery period in a dune-swale land system. These changes are compared with changes recorded over an 11-year period at the Olympic Dam mine site. It found that short-term changes in vegetation revealed by ordination of periodical cover, density and species richness, are attributable to the periodicity of rainfall and that, under present grazing regimes, rainfall effects override grazing effects. Differences between the effects of sheep and cattle hoof damage are worthy of further investigation, as is the impact of kangaroo grazing. These two factors may have important implications for the management of Australian rangelands.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Environmental Biology, 2002

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

East and South-East Asia is a vast and diverse region (Fig. 6.1). The northern boundary can be taken as approximately 45 degrees latitude, from the Gobi desert on the west across Manchuria to the northern shores of Hokkaido, the main island of northern Japan. The southern boundary is over 6,000 kilometres away: the chain of islands from Java to New Guinea, approximately 10 degrees south of the Equator. From west to east across South-East Asia, from the western tip of Sumatra at 95 degrees longitude to the eastern end of New Guinea at 150 degrees longitude, is also some 6,000 kilometres. Transitions to farming within this huge area are discussed in this chapter in the context of four major sub-regions: China; the Korean peninsula and Japan; mainland South-East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Malay peninsula); and island South-East Asia (principally Taiwan, the Philippines, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Sulawesi, and New Guinea). The chapter also discusses the development of agricultural systems across the Pacific islands to the east, both in island Melanesia (the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands east of New Guinea) and in what Pacific archaeologists are terming ‘Remote Oceania’, the islands dotted across the central Pacific as far as Hawaii 6,000 kilometres east of Taiwan and Easter Island some 9,000 kilometres east of New Guinea—a region as big as East Asia and South-East Asia put together. The phytogeographic zones of China reflect the gradual transition from boreal to temperate to tropical conditions, as temperatures and rainfall increase moving southwards (Shi et al., 1993; Fig. 6.2 upper map): coniferous forest in the far north; mixed coniferous and deciduous forest in north-east China (Manchuria) extending into Korea; temperate deciduous and broadleaved forest in the middle and lower valley of the Huanghe (or Yellow) River and the Huai River to the south; sub-tropical evergreen broad-leaved forest in the middle and lower valley of the Yangzi (Yangtze) River; and tropical monsoonal rainforest on the southern coasts, which then extends southwards across mainland and island South-East Asia. Climate and vegetation also differ with altitude and distance from the coast.

Today the wild boar (subspecies Sub scrofa lybica Gray, 1868) is the largest wild mammal found in Israel (Mendelssohn & Yom Tov 1999a). Sus scrofa has formed an integral part of the fauna of Israel since c.0.78 Mya, with the earliest skeletal remains derived from the Lower Palaeolithic site of Gesher Benot Ya’akov, Israel (Hooijer 1959; Geraads & Tchernov 1983). Remains of wild boar are commonly found in archaeological assemblages in this region (e.g. Davis 1982; Tchernov 1988), and according to 19th-century travellers, wild boar were abundant throughout Palestine, including the thickets of the Jordan river and the Dead Sea, and even extended into the arid regions of the northern Negev and Judean desert (Tristram 1866; Hart 1891; Bodenheimer 1958; Qumsiyeh 1996). However, during the period of the Mandate of Palestine (1923–48) the population size of wild boar was severely reduced by hunting, and as a consequence, their distribution was reduced to the Jordan valley, from the Hula Lake in the north to Sdom at the southern tip of the Dead Sea (Bodenheimer 1958; Mendelssohn & Yom-Tov 1999 a, 1999b). Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 they have been protected by legislation, which, coupled with the reduced numbers of predators, has resulted in a marked increase in their numbers. Nowadays, wild boar occupy most of their former habitats including the coastal region. The species has also been observed as far south as Nahal Besor in the northern Negev, but it has been proposed that these animals may represent hybrids of domestic pigs and wild boar (Mendelssohn & Yom-Tov 1999b). Four main concentrations of wild boar can be identified in Israel today: the Upper Galilee (especially in the national park of Mount Meiron), the Hula Nature Reserve, the Golan Heights, and Sdom. As shown in Table 12.1, these areas differ markedly in vegetation, altitude, and climate. A study of dental pathology in skeletal collections derived from these groups showed significant differences between the four areas (Horwitz & Davidowitz 1992). Specifically, the Sdom group was characterized by an unusually high frequency of hypodontia of the lower third incisor, indicative of inbreeding.