Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant by Lyall Watson

By Lyall Watson

A systematic safari and private memoir celebrating the enigmatic dignity of the world's biggest land animal. As a toddler in South Africa, spending summers exploring the wild along with his boyhood acquaintances, Lyall Watson got here nose to nose along with his first elephant. This "entertaining and enchanting" paintings (Washington submit booklet World) chronicles how Watson's fascination grew right into a lifelong quest to appreciate the character and behaviour of this awesome creature.

From that second on, Watson's fascination grew right into a lifelong obsession with realizing the character and behaviour of this remarkable creature. all over the world, the elephant—at as soon as an emblem of religious energy and actual endurance—has been worshipped as a god and searched for sport.

"Watson's insights and speculations are striking, yet what lends them energy is his remarkable wisdom of evolutionary biology and animal habit, ethnography and South African history" (Wade Davis, National Geographic Society). "Like a shaman, Watson evokes the spirit of the big beast" (Publishers Weekly), files the animal's wide-ranging features to recollect and to mourn, and reminds us of its wealthy mythic origins, its evolution, and its devastation in contemporary historical past. half meditation on an elusive animal, half evocation of the facility of position, Elephantoms provides an beautiful mixture of the mysteries of nature and the wonders of formative years.

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Rose diagram of slope direction. The number of sub-window classified as C4 (a) or C5 (b) in each angular bin were divided by the total number of sub-window in that particular direction. Length of pie chart accounts for proportion. In order to quantify the dependency between each vegetation pattern orientation and the terrain slope direction on which they occur, a circular correlation test was performed. e. their travel direction was parallel to the slope). The V-Test (Fisher, 1993) showed that the shift between slope and pattern mean direction diverged consistently from a uniform distribution towards a distribution centred on zero degrees in the classes C2 and C5.

For particular phytogeographic entities, no characteristic species have been found, which can indicate that the current approach has to be refined. Comparison with other families and confrontation with other phytogeographic theories and concepts should be effectuated before more profound conclusions can be drawn. 3. , 1990), the vegetation appears discontinuous and usually covers less than 60% of the landscape (Aguiar and Sala, 1999). In those regions between tropical savannah and desert, one can often observe particular vegetation mosaics in which the vegetation cover is not homogeneously or randomly distributed but is contracted into a “periodic” pattern.

R. E. (1999). Patch structure, dynamics and implications for the functioning of arid ecosystems. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 14, 273-277. Anderson, S. (1994). Area and endemism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 69, 451-471. Antrop, M. (2001). The language of landscape ecologists and planners – A comparative content analysis of concepts used in landscape ecology. Landscape and Urban Planning, 55, 163-173. , Deblauwe, V. and Lejeune, O. Self-organised vegetation patterning as fingerprint of climate and human impact on semiarid ecosystems.

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