Book reviews

Marine pollution (5th edition)

by R.B. Clark, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, UK. 2001, ISBN: 0-19-879292-1

‘Marine Pollution’ by R.B. Clark is the 5th Edition of a book first published in 1986. It

is a good general reference on the subject and is well laid out, well organized and quite

readable. It would be an excellent choice as a reference or textbook in upper level un-

dergraduate or graduate level courses and seminars. There is a well-written introductory

chapter ‘‘What is pollution?’’ Important technical terms are in boldface. Environmental

concern is balanced by realism throughout, e.g. costs of remedies, extent of natural as well

as anthropogenic sources, hard-nosed evaluations of evidence for ecological and human

health damage. There is an appropriate mix of general statements, examples, graphs and

details.

There is an unevenness in the book’s currentness. For example Chapter 5 on Metals is

impressively up to date—it is my area of research but I learned some things I did not know.

In contrast, Chapter 2 on Measuring Change—also a topic I know well—is badly out of

date and would have been acceptable in a late 1980s or early 1990s edition. For ‘‘Further

Reading’’ and sources of figures and tables the average date of references is 1985. There

seems to be no awareness of recent developments in methodology. Warwick and Clarke

have gone way beyond their 1991 paper, which is suggested for further reading. Gauch’s

1982 book ‘‘Multivariate analysis in community ecology’’ is hardly the best choice now—

two decades later—for further reading. Manly’s 1994 ‘‘Multivariate statistical methods: a

primer’’ (Chapman and Hall), perhaps.

Chapter 9 provides a good ‘‘case studies’’ ending, but it is biased toward Europe, with a

somewhat odd gesture to the Caribbean which isn’t all that polluted in the usual sense. It

would have been nice to include another part of the world—somewhere like the Straits of

Malacca for which there is now quite good information about pollution status.

Not citing references in the text makes for a good flow but it can be frustrating as well.

Several times, I wanted a source for a statement but had none, short of reading all cited

‘‘Further reading’’ for that chapter and hoping to find it. The reference to the reliability of

Australian EIAs on p. 14, the statement on p. 103 about taxa which are good versus bad

regulators of heavy metals, and the current estimates of natural inputs of mercury, also on

p. 103, are examples. This style is probably good for undergraduate students but frus-

trating for anyone interested in using this book as a reference.

The distinction among inputs, contamination and pollution on pp. 8–9 is well done. I

particularly liked the treatment of natural versus anthropogenic inputs throughout the

book, and the p. 101 discussion of essential metals in organisms is nicely done. The p. 191

reference to confounding of effects in heated water discharges is good and typical of the

www.elsevier.com/locate/jembe

Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology

269 (2002) 123–125

author’s attention to practical detail. There are some typos, e.g. Fig 3.10 legend ‘‘Rivery’’,

p. 225 ‘‘Gaugh’’, Table 5.2 ‘‘Alumium’’.

Roger H. Green

Centre for Marine and Coastal Studies,

University Science Malaysia,

Penang, Malaysia

E-mail address: rgreen@uwo.ca

A New Bible for Salt Marsh Ecologists

By M.P. Weinstein and D.A. Keeger (Eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht,

Netherlands. 2001, ISBN: 0-7923-6019-2

‘‘Concepts and Controversies in Tidal Marsh Ecology’’ (Kluwer Academic Publishers,

2000, 875 pp. US$98) edited by Michael Weinstein and Daniel Kreeger is an ambitious

volume intended to synthesize our current understanding of salt marsh ecology and the

role of salt marshes in estuarine ecosystems. Dedicated to the pioneering careers of Eugene

Odum and John Teal, the book is the product of a meeting held in Vineland, NJ, USA in

April 1998. The meeting was attended by over 400 salt marsh ecologists from around the

world and the papers that resulted from the conference are, for the most part, well done,

interesting and range widely in topic from the role of bacteria to how regional landscapes

influence salt marshes. It is very long and there is some repetition of popular topics

throughout the book. I do not recommend reading this book in one sitting. There are a total

of 37 chapters written by over 100 authors. Most of the papers address questions that salt

marsh ecologists have long been interested in and many of the papers read like progress

reports on how far they have come in answering the questions laid out 40 years ago. This

makes the volume heavily biased towards a systems view of salt marshes, measuring

productivity patterns and energy and nutrient flow patterns, with less attention paid to a

community perspective, species interactions and experimental ecology. This is fine, since

it reflects the bias of most North American salt marsh ecology, but the ground-breaking

work of Bob Jefferies on the role of consumers in shaping Canadian salt marshes, the

current cordgrass invasion and hybridization being studied by Don Strong and his

colleagues on the Pacific coast of North America, and the more community-level work

that has been done in Australia by Paul Adam, J. Bastow Wilson and their colleagues

would have added breadth to this volume.

Almost the first half of the book is dedicated to reviews of two of the oldest questions

in salt marsh ecology: What controls salt marsh primary production? and What happens to

salt marsh primary production? These chapters provide the most thorough review of our

current understanding of these salt marsh ecology topics that I am aware of and will be a

valuable addition to the literature for students and researchers alike. One of the clearest

messages in these basic chapters is that there is still plenty we do not know about these

questions in spite of 40 years of research. Graduate students will find much to do in

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