Population Ecology

Population Ecology

Author: John H. Vandermeer

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-08-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0691160317

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The essential introduction to population ecology—now expanded and fully updated Ecology is capturing the popular imagination like never before, with issues such as climate change, species extinctions, and habitat destruction becoming ever more prominent. At the same time, the science of ecology has advanced dramatically, growing in mathematical and theoretical sophistication. Here, two leading experts present the fundamental quantitative principles of ecology in an accessible yet rigorous way, introducing students to the most basic of all ecological subjects, the structure and dynamics of populations. John Vandermeer and Deborah Goldberg show that populations are more than simply collections of individuals. Complex variables such as distribution and territory for expanding groups come into play when mathematical models are applied. Vandermeer and Goldberg build these models from the ground up, from first principles, using a broad range of empirical examples, from animals and viruses to plants and humans. They address a host of exciting topics along the way, including age-structured populations, spatially distributed populations, and metapopulations. This second edition of Population Ecology is fully updated and expanded, with additional exercises in virtually every chapter, making it the most up-to-date and comprehensive textbook of its kind. Provides an accessible mathematical foundation for the latest advances in ecology Features numerous exercises and examples throughout Introduces students to the key literature in the field The essential textbook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students An online illustration package is available to professors


Structured-Population Models in Marine, Terrestrial, and Freshwater Systems

Structured-Population Models in Marine, Terrestrial, and Freshwater Systems

Author: Shripad Tuljapurkar

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 1461559731

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In the summer of 1993, twenty-six graduate and postdoctoral stu dents and fourteen lecturers converged on Cornell University for a summer school devoted to structured-population models. This school was one of a series to address concepts cutting across the traditional boundaries separating terrestrial, marine, and freshwa ter ecology. Earlier schools resulted in the books Patch Dynamics (S. A. Levin, T. M. Powell & J. H. Steele, eds., Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1993) and Ecological Time Series (T. M. Powell & J. H. Steele, eds., Chapman and Hall, New York, 1995); a book on food webs is in preparation. Models of population structure (differences among individuals due to age, size, developmental stage, spatial location, or genotype) have an important place in studies of all three kinds of ecosystem. In choosing the participants and lecturers for the school, we se lected for diversity-biologists who knew some mathematics and mathematicians who knew some biology, field biologists sobered by encounters with messy data and theoreticians intoxicated by the elegance of the underlying mathematics, people concerned with long-term evolutionary problems and people concerned with the acute crises of conservation biology. For four weeks, these perspec tives swirled in discussions that started in the lecture hall and carried on into the sweltering Ithaca night. Diversity mayor may not increase stability, but it surely makes things interesting.


Community Ecology

Community Ecology

Author: Peter J. Morin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 731

ISBN-13: 1444341944

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All life on earth occurs in natural assemblages called communities. Community ecology is the study of patterns and processes involving these collections of two or more species. Communities are typically studied using a diversity of techniques, including observations of natural history, statistical descriptions of natural patterns, laboratory and field experiments, and mathematical modelling. Community patterns arise from a complex assortment of processes including competition, predation, mutualism, indirect effects, habitat selection, which result in the most complex biological entities on earth – including iconic systems such as rain forests and coral reefs. This book introduces the reader to a balanced coverage of concepts and theories central to community ecology, using examples drawn from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems, and focusing on animal, plant, and microbial species. The historical development of key concepts is described using descriptions of classic studies, while examples of exciting new developments in recent studies are used to point toward future advances in our understanding of community organization. Throughout, there is an emphasis on the crucial interplay between observations, experiments, and mathematical models. This second updated edition is a valuable resource for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scientists who seek a broad overview of community ecology. The book has developed from a course in community ecology that has been taught by the author since 1983. Figures and tables can be downloaded for free from www.wiley.com/go/morin/communityecology


Sensitivity Analysis: Matrix Methods in Demography and Ecology

Sensitivity Analysis: Matrix Methods in Demography and Ecology

Author: Hal Caswell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 3030105342

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This open access book shows how to use sensitivity analysis in demography. It presents new methods for individuals, cohorts, and populations, with applications to humans, other animals, and plants. The analyses are based on matrix formulations of age-classified, stage-classified, and multistate population models. Methods are presented for linear and nonlinear, deterministic and stochastic, and time-invariant and time-varying cases. Readers will discover results on the sensitivity of statistics of longevity, life disparity, occupancy times, the net reproductive rate, and statistics of Markov chain models in demography. They will also see applications of sensitivity analysis to population growth rates, stable population structures, reproductive value, equilibria under immigration and nonlinearity, and population cycles. Individual stochasticity is a theme throughout, with a focus that goes beyond expected values to include variances in demographic outcomes. The calculations are easily and accurately implemented in matrix-oriented programming languages such as Matlab or R. Sensitivity analysis will help readers create models to predict the effect of future changes, to evaluate policy effects, and to identify possible evolutionary responses to the environment. Complete with many examples of the application, the book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in human demography and population biology. The material will also appeal to those in mathematical biology and applied mathematics.


Modelling Complex Ecological Dynamics

Modelling Complex Ecological Dynamics

Author: Fred Jopp

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-02-11

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 3642050298

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Model development is of vital importance for understanding and management of ecological processes. Identifying the complex relationships between ecological patterns and processes is a crucial task. Ecological modelling—both qualitatively and quantitatively—plays a vital role in analysing ecological phenomena and for ecological theory. This textbook provides a unique overview of modelling approaches. Representing the state-of-the-art in modern ecology, it shows how to construct and work with various different model types. It introduces the background of each approach and its application in ecology. Differential equations, matrix approaches, individual-based models and many other relevant modelling techniques are explained and demonstrated with their use. The authors provide links to software tools and course materials. With chapters written by leading specialists, “Modelling Complex Ecological Dynamics” is an essential contribution to expand the qualification of students, teachers and scientists alike.


Integrodifference Equations in Spatial Ecology

Integrodifference Equations in Spatial Ecology

Author: Frithjof Lutscher

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-10-30

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 3030292940

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This book is the first thorough introduction to and comprehensive treatment of the theory and applications of integrodifference equations in spatial ecology. Integrodifference equations are discrete-time continuous-space dynamical systems describing the spatio-temporal dynamics of one or more populations. The book contains step-by-step model construction, explicitly solvable models, abstract theory and numerical recipes for integrodifference equations. The theory in the book is motivated and illustrated by many examples from conservation biology, biological invasions, pattern formation and other areas. In this way, the book conveys the more general message that bringing mathematical approaches and ecological questions together can generate novel insights into applications and fruitful challenges that spur future theoretical developments. The book is suitable for graduate students and experienced researchers in mathematical ecology alike.


Ecology of Populations

Ecology of Populations

Author: Esa Ranta

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-02-06

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9781139448529

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The theme of the book is the distribution and abundance of organisms in space and time. The core of the book lies in how local births and deaths are tied to emigration and immigration processes, and how environmental variability at different scales affects population dynamics with stochastic processes and spatial structure and shows how elementary analytical tools can be used to understand population fluctuations, synchrony, processes underlying range distributions and community structure and species coexistence. The book also shows how spatial population dynamics models can be used to understand life history evolution and aspects of evolutionary game theory. Although primarily based on analytical and numerical analyses of spatial population processes, data from several study systems are also dealt with.


Evolution and Rationality

Evolution and Rationality

Author: Samir Okasha

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-06-21

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1107004993

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This volume explores from several viewpoints the relationship between Darwinian evolution and the theory of rational choice.


Neural Information Processing

Neural Information Processing

Author: Bao-Liang Lu

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-10-26

Total Pages: 788

ISBN-13: 364224954X

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The three volume set LNCS 7062, LNCS 7063, and LNCS 7064 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2011, held in Shanghai, China, in November 2011. The 262 regular session papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers of part I are organized in topical sections on perception, emotion and development, bioinformatics, biologically inspired vision and recognition, bio-medical data analysis, brain signal processing, brain-computer interfaces, brain-like systems, brain-realistic models for learning, memory and embodied cognition, Clifford algebraic neural networks, combining multiple learners, computational advances in bioinformatics, and computational-intelligent human computer interaction. The second volume is structured in topical sections on cybersecurity and data mining workshop, data mining and knowledge doscovery, evolutionary design and optimisation, graphical models, human-originated data analysis and implementation, information retrieval, integrating multiple nature-inspired approaches, kernel methods and support vector machines, and learning and memory. The third volume contains all the contributions connected with multi-agent systems, natural language processing and intelligent Web information processing, neural encoding and decoding, neural network models, neuromorphic hardware and implementations, object recognition, visual perception modelling, and advances in computational intelligence methods based pattern recognition.