Community Ecology
Community Ecology

Author: Herman A. Verhoef

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0199228973

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Community ecology is the study of the interactions between populations of co-existing species. Co-edited by two prominent community ecologists and featuring contributions from top researchers in the field, this book provides a survey of the state-of-the-art in both the theory and applications of the discipline. It pays special attention to topology, dynamics, and the importance of spatial and temporal scale while also looking at applications to emerging problems in human-dominated ecosystems (including the restoration and reconstruction of viable communities). Community Ecology: Processes, Models, and Applications adopts a mainly theoretical approach and focuses on the use of network-based theory, which remains little explored in standard community ecology textbooks. The book includes discussion of the effects of biotic invasions on natural communities; the linking of ecological network structure to empirically measured community properties and dynamics; the effects of evolution on community patterns and processes; and the integration of fundamental interactions into ecological networks. A final chapter indicates future research directions for the discipline.

Handbook of Citizen Science in Ecology and Conservation
Handbook of Citizen Science in Ecology and Conservation

Author: Christopher Andrew Lepczyk

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0520284798

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Handbook of Citizen Science in Ecology and Conservation is the first practical and comprehensive manual that provides step-by-step instructions for creating natural science research projects that involve collaboration between scientists and the general public. As citizen-science projects become increasingly common, there is a growing need for concrete best practices around planning and implementing successful projects that can allow project leaders to guide and gauge success of projects while ensuring the collection of high-quality data. Based on a variety of case studies from several citizen-science projects, this is the definitive reference guide for all potential citizen-science practitioners, ranging from professors and graduate students to staff at agencies and nongovernmental organizations"--

The Theory of Ecological Communities (MPB-57)
The Theory of Ecological Communities (MPB-57)

Author: Mark Vellend

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0691208999

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological communities? What other scientific areas might serve as a guiding framework? As it turns out, the core focus of community ecology—understanding patterns of diversity and composition of biological variants across space and time—is shared by evolutionary biology and its very coherent conceptual framework, population genetics theory. The Theory of Ecological Communities takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole. Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching processes: selection among species, drift, dispersal, and speciation. These are analogues of the four central processes in population genetics theory—selection within species, drift, gene flow, and mutation—and together they subsume almost all of the many dozens of more specific models built to describe the dynamics of communities of interacting species. The result is a theory that allows the effects of many low-level processes, such as competition, facilitation, predation, disturbance, stress, succession, colonization, and local extinction to be understood as the underpinnings of high-level processes with widely applicable consequences for ecological communities. Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, The Theory of Ecological Communities provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.

Community Ecology
Community Ecology

Author: Mark Gardener

Publisher: Pelagic Publishing Ltd

Published: 2014-02-01

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 1907807632

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Interactions between species are of fundamental importance to all living systems and the framework we have for studying these interactions is community ecology. This is important to our understanding of the planets biological diversity and how species interactions relate to the functioning of ecosystems at all scales. Species do not live in isolation and the study of community ecology is of practical application in a wide range of conservation issues. The study of ecological community data involves many methods of analysis. In this book you will learn many of the mainstays of community analysis including: diversity, similarity and cluster analysis, ordination and multivariate analyses. This book is for undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers seeking a step-by-step methodology for analysing plant and animal communities using R and Excel. Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet is virtually ubiquitous and familiar to most computer users. It is a robust program that makes an excellent storage and manipulation system for many kinds of data, including community data. The R program is a powerful and flexible analytical system able to conduct a huge variety of analytical methods, which means that the user only has to learn one program to address many research questions. Its other advantage is that it is open source and therefore completely free. Novel analytical methods are being added constantly to the already comprehensive suite of tools available in R. Mark Gardener is both an ecologist and an analyst. He has worked in a range of ecosystems around the world and has been involved in research across a spectrum of community types. His knowledge of R is largely self-taught and this gives him insight into the needs of students learning to use R for complicated analyses.

A Framework for Community Ecology
A Framework for Community Ecology

Author: Paul A. Keddy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-09

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1316512606

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offers a unifying framework for community ecology by addressing how communities are assembled from species pools.

The State of Nature
The State of Nature

Author: Gregg Mitman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992-10

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780226532370

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Although science may claim to be "objective," scientists cannot avoid the influence of their own values on their research. In The State of Nature, Gregg Mitman examines the relationship between issues in early twentieth-century American society and the sciences of evolution and ecology to reveal how explicit social and political concerns influenced the scientific agenda of biologists at the University of Chicago and throughout the United States during the first half of this century. Reacting against the view of nature "red in tooth and claw," ecologists and behavioral biologists such as Warder Clyde Allee, Alfred Emerson, and their colleagues developed research programs they hoped would validate and promote an image of human society as essentially cooperative rather than competitive. Mitman argues that Allee's religious training and pacifist convictions shaped his pioneering studies of animal communities in a way that could be generalized to denounce the view that war is in our genes.

Ecology and Evolution of Communities
Ecology and Evolution of Communities

Author: Martin L. Cody

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780674224445

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The evolution of species abundance and diversity; Competitive strategies of resource allocation; Community structure; Outlook.

Ecology, Community and Lifestyle
Ecology, Community and Lifestyle

Author: Arne Naess

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-10-26

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780521348737

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The basic thesis of the work is that environmental problems are only to be solved by people - people who will be required to make value judgements in conflicts that go beyond narrowly conceived human concerns. Thus people require not only an ethical system, but a way of conceiving the world and themselves such that the intrinsic value of life and nature is obvious, a system based on 'deep ecological principles'. The book encourages readers to identify their own series of such parameters - their own ecosophies. Ecology, Comunity and Lifestyle will appeal to philosophers, specialists working on environmental issues, and the more general reader who is interested in learning some of the foundational ideas of the rapidly expanding field of environmental philosophy.