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The ultimate purpose of conservation science is to inform and affect conservation policy. Therefore, conservation biologists and all the people who produce, review, and apply conservation research should evaluate the success of their knowledge according to its ability to influence conservation decisions. In addition to possessing conventional "scientific" attributes such as validity, generalizability, and precision, conservation knowledge must also possess qualities that make it effective in the political arena of decision making. "Public ecology" is a philosophy and practice of conservation science that goes beyond biology and beyond the norms of modern science to construct knowledge that is useful for environmental decision making. As post-normal conservation science, public ecology is defined by the following six attributes: evaluative, contextual, multiscalar, integrative, adaptive, and accessible. We discuss the need for a more public ecology and describe the qualites that make it a more powerful ecology. Más allá de la Biología: Hacia una Ecología más Pública para la ConservaciónResumen: El propósito fundamental de la ciencia de la conservación es el informar y afectar las políticas de conservación. Por lo tanto, los biólogos conservacionistas y toda la gente que produce, revisa y aplica la investigación en conservación debería evaluar el éxito de su conocimiento de acuerdo con su capacidad de influenciar las decisiones sobre conservación. Además de poseer atributos "científicos" convencionales (validéz, generalización, precisión), el conocimiento sobre conservación debería también tener cualidades que lo hagan eficiente en el entorno politico de la toma de decisiones. La "ecología pública" es una filosofía y una práctica de la ciencia de la conservación que va más allá de la biología y de las normas de las ciencias modernas para construir el conocimiento y que es útil para la toma de decisiones ambientales. Como la ciencia post-normal de la conservación, la ecología pública se define por los siguientes seis atributos: evaluativa, contextual, multiescala, integrativa, adaptativa y accesible. Discutimos la necesidad de una ecología más pública y describimos las cualidades que la convierten en una ecología más poderosa.

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Sunlighting or direct-gain passive solar strategies let sunlight penetrate the living space. In environments where the well-being of the building occupant is a salient concern to the designer, this intrusion of sunlight ought to be controlled so that it does not impede the performance of the occupant. This study investigates the impact of window size and different amounts of sunlight penetration on occupant emotional response and degree of satisfaction. Unlike previous sunlight requirement studies, sunlight penetration is measured not in terms of duration, but rather in terms of size of sunlit areas, and therefore as a visual stimulus. The study was performed in an office room of a typical size. It was found that window size did not significantly affect the occupant emotional state or the degree of satisfaction. Sunlight penetration significantly affected the feeling of relaxation when the observer was sitting sideways to the window and the relationship had an inverted U-shape. The study stresses the validity of this novel way of assessing sunlight penetration in terms of size of the sun patches inside the room and its importance as a significant environmental attribute and design parameter that ought to be accounted for during the design of windows in sunlighting or direct-gain passive solar strategies.