Download or read book Macroecology Concepts and Consequences written by British Ecological Society. Symposium and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Macroecology: Concepts and Consequences brings together for the first time major researchers in the field to present overviews of current thinking about the form and determinants of macroecological patterns. Each section presents different viewpoints on the answer to a key question in macroecology, such as why are most species rare, why are most species small-bodied, and why are most species restricted in their distribution?
Download or read book Macroecology written by Tim M Blackburn and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Marine Macroecology written by Jon D. Witman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneered in the late 1980s, the concept of macroecology—a framework for studying ecological communities with a focus on patterns and processes—revolutionized the field. Although this approach has been applied mainly to terrestrial ecosystems, there is increasing interest in quantifying macroecological patterns in the sea and understanding the processes that generate them. Taking stock of the current work in the field and advocating a research agenda for the decades ahead, Marine Macroecology draws together insights and approaches from a diverse group of scientists to show how marine ecology can benefit from the adoption of macroecological approaches. Divided into three parts, Marine Macroecology first provides an overview of marine diversity patterns and offers case studies of specific habitats and taxonomic groups. In the second part, contributors focus on process-based explanations for marine ecological patterns. The third part presents new approaches to understanding processes driving the macroecolgical patterns in the sea. Uniting unique insights from different perspectives with the common goal of identifying and understanding large-scale biodiversity patterns, Marine Macroecology will inspire the next wave of marine ecologists to approach their research from a macroecological perspective.
Download or read book Cave Ecology written by Oana Teodora Moldovan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-05 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cave organisms are the ‘monsters’ of the underground world and studying them invariably raises interesting questions about the ways evolution has equipped them to survive in permanent darkness and low-energy environments. Undertaking ecological studies in caves and other subterranean habitats is not only challenging because they are difficult to access, but also because the domain is so different from what we know from the surface, with no plants at the base of food chains and with a nearly constant microclimate year-round. The research presented here answers key questions such as how a constant environment can produce the enormous biodiversity seen below ground, what adaptations and peculiarities allow subterranean organisms to thrive, and how they are affected by the constraints of their environment. This book is divided into six main parts, which address: the habitats of cave animals; their complex diversity; the environmental factors that support that diversity; individual case studies of cave ecosystems; and of the conservation challenges they face; all of which culminate in proposals for future research directions. Given its breadth of coverage, it offers an essential reference guide for graduate students and established researchers alike.
Download or read book Speciation and Patterns of Diversity written by Roger Butlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-22 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together the viewpoints of leading ecologists concerned with the processes that generate patterns of diversity, and evolutionary biologists who focus on mechanisms of speciation, this book opens up discussion in order to broaden understanding of how speciation affects patterns of biological diversity, especially the uneven distribution of diversity across time, space and taxa studied by macroecologists. The contributors discuss questions such as: Are species equivalent units, providing meaningful measures of diversity? To what extent do mechanisms of speciation affect the functional nature and distribution of species diversity? How can speciation rates be measured using molecular phylogenies or data from the fossil record? What are the factors that explain variation in rates? Written for graduate students and academic researchers, the book promotes a more complete understanding of the interaction between mechanisms and rates of speciation and these patterns in biological diversity.
Download or read book Biotic Interactions in the Tropics written by David Burslem and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand how tropical ecosystems work we need to appreciate how the organisms within them interact with each other. This volume, first published in 2005, synthesises the state of knowledge in this area, providing reviews or case studies from both Old and New World tropics and dealing with taxa at all trophic levels.
Download or read book Trophic Ecology written by James E. Garvey and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a bridge between ecological paradigms – organismal/community approaches to food web dynamics and ecosystem-level approaches to production. The unification of organismal, community, and ecosystem approaches in ecology is emerging due to the growing availability of new techniques for assessing trophic interactions and their implications for ecosystems. Trophic Ecology is a formal text for both newcomers to the discipline as well as seasoned professionals looking for new ideas and refreshers on old topics. A wide range of topics are explained including autotrophy, heterotrophy, omnivory, decomposition, foraging behavior and theory, trophic cascades, bioenergetics, and production. The audience is upper-level undergraduate students and entry-level graduate students interested in autecological, organismal approaches to ecology, community and ecosystem ecology. It is also a reference text for instructors teaching upper-division courses, providing examples from the literature, quantitative approaches to teach, and new hypotheses yet to be fully tested by ecologists.
Download or read book Principles of Thermal Ecology Temperature Energy and Life written by Andrew Clarke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Temperature affects everything. It influences all aspects of the physical environment and governs any process that involves a flow of energy, setting boundaries on what an organism can or cannot do. This novel textbook reveals the key principles behind the complex relationship between organisms and temperature, namely the science of thermal ecology. It starts by providing a rigorous framework for understanding the flow of energy in and out of the organism, before describing the influence of temperature on what organisms can do and how fast they can do it. With these fundamental principles covered, the bulk of the book explores thermal ecology itself, incorporating the important extra dimension of interactions with other organisms. An entire chapter is devoted to the crucially important subject of how organisms are responding to climate change. Indeed, the threat of rapid climatic change on a global scale is a stark reminder of the challenges that remain for evolutionary thermal biologists, and adds a sense of urgency to this book's mission.
Download or read book Global Neoproterozoic Petroleum Systems written by Jonathan Craig and published by Geological Society of London. This book was released on 2009 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Worldwide, Neoproterozoic successions are major hydrocarbon producers. In North Africa, large basins with significant surface outcrops and thick sedimen-tary fills are widespread. These basins are now emerging as potential sources of hydrocarbons and are attracting interest both from geological researchers and the oil and gas industry. This volume focuses on recent developments in the understanding and correla-tion of North African basin fills and explores novel approaches to prospecting for source and reservoir rocks. The papers cover aspects of petroleum prospectivity and age-equivalent global petroleum systems, Neoproterozoic tectonics and pa-laeogeography, sequence stratigraphy, glacial events and global climatic models, faunal and floral evolution and the deposition of early source rocks. The broader aim is to compare with, and learn from, well-studied Neoproterozoic successions globally, including major environmental change, the emergence of life, the global carbon cycle and implications for hydrocarbon exploration.
Download or read book Human Biogeography written by Alexander Harcourt and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-05-02 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative, wide-ranging synthesis of anthropology and biogeography, Alexander Harcourt tells how and why our species came to be distributed around the world. He explains our current understanding of human origins, tells how climate determined our spread, and describes the barriers that delayed and directed migrating peoples. He explores the rich and complex ways in which our anatomy, physiology, cultural diversity, and population density vary from region to region in the areas we inhabit. The book closes with chapters on how human cultures have affected each other’s geographic distributions, how non-human species have influenced human distribution, and how humans have reduced the ranges of many other species while increasing the ranges of others. Throughout, Harcourt compares what we understand of human biogeography to non-human primate biogeography.
Download or read book Animal Body Size written by Felisa A. Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-08-09 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Galileo wrote that “nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially of his bones”—a statement that wonderfully captures a long-standing scientific fascination with body size. Why are organisms the size that they are? And what determines their optimum size? This volume explores animal body size from a macroecological perspective, examining species, populations, and other large groups of animals in order to uncover the patterns and causal mechanisms of body size throughout time and across the globe. The chapters represent diverse scientific perspectives and are divided into two sections. The first includes chapters on insects, snails, birds, bats, and terrestrial mammals and discusses the body size patterns of these various organisms. The second examines some of the factors behind, and consequences of, body size patterns and includes chapters on community assembly, body mass distribution, life history, and the influence of flight on body size.
Download or read book Dynamic Aquaria written by Walter H. Adey and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2024-03-11 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dynamic Aquaria: Building and Restoring Ecosystems and the Biosphere, Fourth Edition demonstrates how the living systems modeling of aquatic ecosystems for ecological, biological, physiological research, and ecosystem restoration produce answers to very complex ecological questions. The book describes unique characteristics of water that have allowed carbon chemistry to flourish and evolve life over 4 billion years, along with current disruptions such as global warming, overfishing, and chemical pollution. New content in this edition includes the use of LED lighting, DNA sequencing in microcosm construction and analysis, and the expansion of the bioengineered tool Algal Turf Scrubbing (ATS) to combat global pollution problems.The book also features new information on marine calcification, research microcosms, thermogeography, and methods of water movement for minimizing plankton loss. It supports a deeper biological and ecological intelligence among the human population to better understand the processes behind environmental issues. - Offers the basic physical and chemical background necessary for understanding aquatic and marine ecosystems - Expands available electro-mechanical tools for developing living system models - Features new information on the biomimicry water control system, Algal Turf Scrubbing (ATS) - Evidences how ecosystem modeling can contribute to the understanding of climate change
Download or read book Tropical Forest Community Ecology written by Walter Carson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, tropical ecology has been a science often content with descriptive and demographic approaches, which is understandable given the difficulty of studying these ecosystems and the need for basic demographic information. Nonetheless, over the last several years, tropical ecologists have begun to test more sophisticated ecological theory and are now beginning to address a broad array of questions that are of particular importance to tropical systems, and ecology in general. Why are there are so many species in tropical forests and what mechanisms are responsible for the maintenance of that vast species diversity? What factors control species coexistence? Are there common patterns of species abundance and distribution across broad geographic scales? What is the role of trophic interactions in these complex ecosystems? How can these fragile ecosystems be conserved? Containing contributions from some of the world’s leading tropical ecologists, Tropical Forest Community Ecology provides a summary of the key issues in the discipline of tropical ecology: Includes contributions from some of the world’s leading tropical ecologists Covers patterns of species distribution, the maintenance of species diversity, the community ecology of tropical animals, forest regeneration and conservation of tropical ecosystems
Download or read book Holocene Extinctions written by Sam Turvey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-28 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This makes a detailed consideration of these extinctions a useful system for investigating the impacts of human activity over time.
Download or read book Avian Invasions written by Tim M. Blackburn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-25 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text summarizes and synthesizes the literature on introduced bird ecology and evolution. It unravels the insights that the study of exotic birds brings to these research strands.
Download or read book Recent Advances In Artificial Life written by Hussein A Abbass and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2005-11-04 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial life is now a recognized discipline of research with many important applications and software tools. However, many theoretical issues remain unresolved. This book brings together a cross-section of key developments in artificial life, which in turn gives us new insight into the theory of complex systems.The central ideas of the book surround genetics and evolution in an artificial life framework. Topics covered include maintenance of genetic diversity, hierarchical structures and stability of ecosystems. Underpinning these topics are key theoretical developments surrounding network complexity, the development of pattern languages for complex networks and a deeper understanding of the edge of chaos where complex systems live. Practical applications include optimization, gene regulatory networks, modeling the spread of disease and the evolution of ageing.The reader will gain an insight into the mathematical techniques at the core of artificial life and encounter a sufficient diversity of applications to stimulate new directions in their own field.
Download or read book Biodiversity Erosion written by Christian Lévêque and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The erosion of biodiversity is currently highly publicized. Militant movements accuse humans of destroying nature and being responsible for a sixth mass extinction. However, this anxiety-provoking message is sometimes based on misconceptions, false or partisan ideas, and media relays that favor and amplify alarmist information. If the situation of certain populations is worrying, it is not a general phenomenon because others are expanding. Rather than holding a globalizing discourse, it is necessary to recontextualize and relativize the debate to better define the necessary actions. Biodiversity Erosion analyzes numerous scientific publications, as well as alarming discussions, emphasizing the multiple biases present in the way information is presented. This book questions the relevance of the notion of species and the desire to compile an inventory of all living things. It argues for a less Manichean approach to our relationship with nature.
