Unraveling the ecology of marine fish migration

Issues are typically explained with sufficient examples, e.g., describing single species and individual practices in specific locations. These details make the book much more understandable for, e.g., readers unfamiliar with Europe. Despite adding case studies from other countries, the book still has a heavy emphasis on Great Britain. This is understandable, given that Great Britain had great fluctuations in human impacts on forests and thus maybe the most extreme shifts in forest conditions in Europe. In addition, scientists from Great Britain have access to a great amount of detailed documentation. However, a brief overview of how issues, such as the inventory of ancient woodlands or their equivalents, are handled in other parts of Europe would have been helpful. Given the multitude of authors, the chapters are surprisingly consistent and balanced in approach and style, which makes for an easy read. I also enjoyed that the chapters were focused and of sufficient length and detail to thoroughly cover their respective topics. Thus, chapters can easily be used as standalone material, e.g., in classes or workshops. On the other hand, the narrowly focused chapters treat topics somewhat in isolation and give the impression of a “collection of papers” (a label used in the Chartered Forester review). For example, recent trends in inventories of wood pastures (Chapter 5) and ancient woodlands (Chapter 22) would have lent themselves to comparisons. Also, if it not for Chapter 23, one could get the impression from the rest of the book that exotic diseases had no influence on and were not influenced by historical developments and management and conservation practices. Even adding brief insights to the chapters highlighting the connections among such topics would have provided the reader with a feeling of a more coherent and complete story. I appreciate the challenges of publishing books with multiple authors, but feel that the editors did not exploit the full wealth of information provided in the chapters. For example, the duality and the potential conflict of using prehuman settlement forests versus cultural landscapes as conservation and restoration goals appears to be a major discussion point in Europe. Accordingly, the topic shows up in numerous chapters, e.g., in the Swedish (prehuman settlement forests) and Italian and Great Britain (cultural landscapes) case studies. Also, Chapter 21 (which would have been better placed in Part I so the reader becomes aware of the subtleties of the issues early on) provides a nice general overview of this topic. However, neither this chapter nor other chapters written by the editors took advantage of the obvious opportunity to use this topic as a common theme or thread that links all chapters in the book. In addition, I was hoping for a more cohesive discussion about the role and value of introduced species (another topic that showed up in various chapters) and the ongoing discussion in Europe of integrated vs. segregated approaches to forest management and conservation. While I really enjoyed reading this book, in this respect it left me longing for more.