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EBookClubs

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Book The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems

Download or read book The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems written by J. Philip Grime and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES THAT SHAPE ECOSYSTEMS In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote “I think”, and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of Darwin’s tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation – adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but also to life with other living things. However, more than 150 years since Darwin published his singular idea of natural selection, the science of ecology has yet to account for how contrasting evolutionary outcomes affect the ability of organisms to coexist in communities and to regulate ecosystem functioning. In this book Philip Grime and Simon Pierce explain how evidence from across the world is revealing that, beneath the wealth of apparently limitless and bewildering variation in detailed structure and functioning, the essential biology of all organisms is subject to the same set of basic interacting constraints on life-history and physiology. The inescapable resulting predicament during the evolution of every species is that, according to habitat, each must adopt a predictable compromise with regard to how they use the resources at their disposal in order to survive. The compromise involves the investment of resources in either the effort to acquire more resources, the tolerance of factors that reduce metabolic performance, or reproduction. This three-way trade-off is the irreducible core of the universal adaptive strategy theory which Grime and Pierce use to investigate how two environmental filters selecting, respectively, for convergence and divergence in organism function determine the identity of organisms in communities, and ultimately how different evolutionary strategies affect the functioning of ecosystems. This book refl ects an historic phase in which evolutionary processes are finally moving centre stage in the effort to unify ecological theory, and animal, plant and microbial ecology have begun to find a common theoretical framework. Companion website This book has a companion website www.wiley.com/go/grime/evolutionarystrategies with Figures and Tables from the book for downloading.

Book Christians in China Before the Year 1550

Download or read book Christians in China Before the Year 1550 written by A. C. Moule and published by Martino Fine Books. This book was released on 2011-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2011 Reprint of 1930 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Illustrated with 22 plans, views, portraits etc. The plan of this book is to gather into one volume the available evidence of the existence of Christians in China in the early and middle ages of the Christian era, and to give in English translation the actual words of the original authorities in every case, avoiding as far as possible all generalizations, summaries or expressions of personal opinion by the editor. References and explanations have been provided in the footnotes. Chapters on the Tang Dynasty, The Zaitun Crosses, Rabban Sauma, the Mission of the Franciscan Brothers and more. Scarce in the original.