Wetlands Fifth Edition

Abstract

This is the fifth edition of Wetlands—we updated the book every seven years from 1993 to 2007—since Van Nostrand Reinhold published the first edition in 1986. This fifth edition (referred to here as Wetlands 5) is eight years after the Wetlands 4 but the additional one-year wait is well worth it, especially because so much new has happened the last year in the world of wetlands. Because of requests by many instructors using this textbook, we reincorporated updated versions of our “ecosystem chapters” that were popular parts of the first three editions of Wetlands. Theses ecosystem chapters—now in Part III: Wetland Ecosystems (chapters 8 through 12)—bring back the ecosystem view of tidal marshes, mangroves, freshwater marshes and swamps, and northern peatlands. We had spit the 2000 edition of Wetlands into essentially two books—Wetlands 4 (2007) and Wetland Ecosystems (2009), partially because students were asking for a shorter textbook. Most if not all of the pertinent information in those two books, all updated, is now included in one book. Yet Wetlands 5 is 744 pages long, 20 percent shorter than the 920-page Wetlands 3. Instructors now have the choice of including or not including these ecosystem chapters, which were always among our favorites because of their “systems” view, in their syllabi. The chapters, by definition, integrate the otherwise separate fields of hydrology, biogeochemistry, microbiology, vegetation, consumers, and ecosystem function for the main types of wetlands found in the world in single chapters. There is much new in Wetlands 5 in addition to the five reinserted and updated ecosystem chapters in Part III. We provide a newly published trend of wetland publications in the world, a summary and list of publications from the every-four-year INTECOL international wetland conferences and the addition of MegaPython vs. Gatoroid campy science fiction wetland movie playbill to replace the long-reigning Swamp Thing movie playbill in Part I: Introduction. Updates of many of the great wetlands of the world are also provided in this section of the book, including new photos and descriptions of several wetlands in China