National governments and research scientists may be equally concerned with issues of global environmental change, but their interests-and their timelines-are not the same. Governments are often focused on short-term effects and local impacts of global phenomena. Scientists, on the other hand, are loath to engage in speculation about the specific consequences of large-scale environmental trends.How then can we translate scientific understanding of these trends into public policy?

Sustaining Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Soils and Sediments brings together the world's leading ecologists, systematists, and evolutionary biologists to present scientific information that integrates soil and sediment disciplines across terrestrial, marine, and freshwater ecosystems. It offers a framework for a new discipline, one that will allow future scientists to consider the linkages of biodiversity below-surface, and how biota interact to provide the essential ecosystemserv...

Biodiversity Change and Human Health brings together leading experts from the natural science and social science realms as well as the medical community to explore the explicit linkages between human-driven alterations of biodiversity and documented impacts of those changes on human health. The book utilizes multidisciplinary approaches to explore and address the complex interplay between natural biodiversity and human health and well-being. The five parts examinehealth tr...

The children are still in the room. That's the thing nobody on the administrative side seems to remember.The Learning Curve is the seventh issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and three shorter pieces about teachers and EdTech under pressure at Riverside School District, where educational technology promises liberation but delivers standardized compliance.A golden retriever teacher fights to keep his class a class...

The queue is where favors hide. The queue is where blame moves. The queue is where surveillance normalizes and small crimes become workflow.Ticket Closed is the fifth issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and four shorter pieces about tech support and IT ops at DataFlow Technologies.A mole enters a live outage where the alert already blames the wrong deployment. He follows one log line away from the convenient answ...

Evidence behaves like a character in these stories. It hides. It reappears. It gets renamed, gets stripped of metadata, or betrays the person trying to tame it.Discovery is the eighth issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and three shorter pieces about legal ops and litigation support at Hartwell & Associates, where process becomes more important than justice and tidy processes are records of bad faith.A bloodhound...

The cheapest bid is never actually cheap. Somebody always pays the difference, and it's usually not the bidder.Lowest Bid is the sixth issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and three shorter pieces about construction and procurement under pressure at Metro Construction Authority.A bloodhound attends the bid opening and notices the winning number is low exactly where later change orders can hide. He tests innocent e...

Let's get dirty. In childhood, the back yard, the flowerbed, the beach, the mucky place where land slips into puddles, lakes, and streams are infinitely fascinating. It is a mistake to leave that "childish" fascination with mud and dirt behind. The soils of the Earth, whether underneath our feet or pressurized beneath tons of ocean water, hold life in abundance. A handful of garden dirt may harbor more species than the entire aboveground Amazon.The robotic rovers Spirit and Opportu...

Quarter close. Everyone wants one clean number and one quiet night.Closing the Books is the third issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and three shorter pieces about accounting and finance operations at Meridian Financial Services.An owl accountant finds a journal entry posted one minute before close by a deactivated user, then follows it from ledger timing to a cash transfer that never landed and a rehab site alr...

At Unified Healthcare Partners, denied care is called 'cost optimization.' The institutional doublespeak is the setting, not the plot. The plot is what people do inside it.Code Redacted is the second issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and three shorter pieces about medical coding and insurance claims under pressure.A fox senior coder recognizes the hunt—this time he's helping predators stalk vulnerable patients....

TechFlow Solutions is selling a product that can't do what the company says it does. The question isn't whether someone will notice. It's what they'll do when they do.Workflow Anomalies is the fourth issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and four shorter pieces about corporate operations under pressure.A badger PM opens a green weekly packet and finds the blocker list has been moved into an appendix. His story foll...

The board says the ER is running efficiently. The hallway says otherwise.Critical Hours is the first issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and four shorter pieces about nursing and allied healthcare at St. Vincent's Medical Center, where the hallway is more trustworthy than the glowing board overhead.A rabbit charge nurse watches a new AI patient-load system optimize for metrics instead of care—his veteran instinct...