Ecology in practice / edited by F.Di Castri, F.W.G. Baker and M.Hadley

THE MAB PROGRAMME was launched by Unesco in 1971 as an international programme of research on the interactions between man and his environment. Its aim is to provide the scientific knowledge and trained personnel to manage natural resources in a rational and sustained manner. By virtue of its scale a hundred countries engaged in a cooperative effort on some thousand research and training projects - the MAB Programme constitutes a vast natural laboratory for innovating approaches to environmental problems. The programme gives pride of place to work in the field, at the local level, within general frameworks for scientific cooperation at the international level.

ECOLOGY IN PRACTICE is based on invited papers presented at an international conference, organized by Unesco and ICSU to take scientific stock of the results achieved in ten years of research within MAB. The sixty-one contributions in this two-volume book illustrate how a certain approach to land use problems involving planners, local populations and scientists from a range of disciplines - - can be made to work in different regions of the world, given the right mix of ingredients and the necessary good will on the part of all concerned. It is hoped that they will prove of general interest to those concerned with seeking to apply the approaches and techniques of ecological research to the needs of land use planning and resource management.