Suchergebnisse

Along with its companion volume, this book offers a fascinating glimpse into the current avenues of research into colour, a phenomenon which daily affects all our lives in often surprising ways. The majority of the papers originated in a 2004 conference entitled 'Progress in Colour Studies' which was held in the University of Glasgow, U.K. The contributions to this first volume, which is principally linguistic and anthropological in content, and to its companion on the psychological aspects of colour, present either summaries of state-of-the-art colour research in various disciplines, or in-depth accounts of certain aspects of such work. This volume includes approaches such as Natural Semantic Metalanguage, social network analysis, quantitative analysis, type modification, vantage theory, the centrality of social norms of inference, place-names and heraldry. In the process, new insights are offered into the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Sorbian, Burarra, Cape Breton Gaelic, Tzotzil, and others.

Global and regional change clearly affects the structure and functioning of ecosystems in shelf seas. However, complex interactions within the shelf seas hinder the identification and unambiguous attribution of observed changes to drivers. These include variability in the climate system, in ocean dynamics, in biogeochemistry, and in shelf sea resource exploitation in the widest sense by societies. Observational time series are commonly too short, and resolution, integration time, and complexity of models are often insufficient to unravel natural variability from anthropogenic perturbation. The North Sea is a shelf sea of the North Atlantic and is impacted by virtually all global and regional developments. Natural variability (from interannual to multidecadal time scales) as response to forcing in the North Atlantic is overlain by global trends (sea level, temperature, acidification) and alternating phases of direct human impacts and attempts to remedy those. Human intervention started some 1000 years ago (diking and associated loss of wetlands), expanded to near-coastal parts in the industrial revolution of the mid-19th century (river management, waste disposal in rivers), and greatly accelerated in the mid-1950s (eutrophication, pollution, fisheries). The North Sea is now a heavily regulated shelf sea, yet societal goals (good environmental status versus increased uses), demands for benefits and policies diverge increasingly. Likely, the southern North Sea will be re-zoned as riparian countries dedicate increasing sea space for offshore wind energy generation - with uncertain consequences for the system's environmental status. We review available observational and model data (predominantly from the southeastern North Sea region) to identify and describe effects of natural variability, of secular changes, and of human impacts on the North Sea ecosystem, and outline developments in the next decades in response to environmental legislation, and in response to increased use of shelf sea space