Fifty Years After the "Homage to Santa Rosalia": Old and New Paradigms on Biodiversity in Aquatic Ecosystems
Fifty Years After the

Author: Luigi Naselli-Flores

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-03-21

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9048199085

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This book celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of publication of one of the landmarks of the modern ecological thought: the “Homage to Santa Rosalia or why are there so many kinds of animals” by George Evelyn Hutchinson. Published in 1959 in the journal “The American Naturalist”, this article has been the engine which have moved most of the ecological research on biodiversity in the last half a century. Hutchinson starts his article by telling the legend of Santa Rosalia, a hermit who died in the second half of the XIII century and who spent the last years of her life in a cave nearby a pond. In this pond Hutchinson collected two species of aquatic insects and took the inspiration to explore the reasons why life is present on our Planet in such amazing variety of forms. This article thus inaugurated the season of research on biodiversity. Researchers and students in the field of ecology are the readers to whom this book is mainly addressed but also those involved in the history of Science will find in this book useful information. Issued in 2010, which has been declared “international Year of Biodiversity” by the United Nations, this book is also a tribute to the biological diversity allowing, enriching and sustaining human life.

Fifty Years After the "Homage to Santa Rosalia": Old and New Paradigms on Biodiversity in Aquatic Ecosystems
Fifty Years After the

Author: Luigi Naselli-Flores

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9789048199099

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of publication of one of the landmarks of the modern ecological thought: the "Homage to Santa Rosalia or why are there so many kinds of animals" by George Evelyn Hutchinson. Published in 1959 in the journal "The American Naturalist", this article has been the engine which have moved most of the ecological research on biodiversity in the last half a century. Hutchinson starts his article by telling the legend of Santa Rosalia, a hermit who died in the second half of the XIII century and who spent the last years of her life in a cave nearby a pond. In this pond Hutchinson collected two species of aquatic insects and took the inspiration to explore the reasons why life is present on our Planet in such amazing variety of forms. This article thus inaugurated the season of research on biodiversity. Researchers and students in the field of ecology are the readers to whom this book is mainly addressed but also those involved in the history of Science will find in this book useful information. Issued in 2010, which has been declared "international Year of Biodiversity" by the United Nations, this book is also a tribute to the biological diversity allowing, enriching and sustaining human life.

Studies on Eurytemora
Studies on Eurytemora

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-07-26

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 9004465561

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The monograph contains new information about biodiversity, morphology and ecology in the model group of estuarine crustaceans, Eurytemora, widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere. Several chapters treat questions on ecology and phylogeny related to marine species and time and place of origin of these calanoid copepod species.

Zooplankton Diversity and Pelagic Food Webs
Zooplankton Diversity and Pelagic Food Webs

Author: Marina Manca

Publisher: MDPI

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 3039435493

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Zooplankton are of key importance in the structure and functioning of aquatic food webs. They contribute to a large part of the functional and structural biodiversity of predator and prey plankton communities. Promptly responding to long-term and seasonal changes in the physical and chemical environment, they are sensitive indicators of patterns and mechanisms of impact drivers, both natural and human induced. In this volume, we aim to present evidence for both long-term and seasonal changes in zooplankton community structure and dynamics, investigating different approaches from population dynamics to advanced molecular techniques and reconstructing past communities from subfossil remains in lake sediments.

The Ecology of Phytoplankton
The Ecology of Phytoplankton

Author: C. S. Reynolds

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-05-04

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1139454897

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This important new book by Colin Reynolds covers the adaptations, physiology and population dynamics of phytoplankton communities. It provides basic information on composition, morphology and physiology of the main phyletic groups represented in marine and freshwater systems and in addition reviews recent advances in community ecology.

Future Evolution
Future Evolution

Author: Peter D. Ward

Publisher: W. H. Freeman

Published: 2002-01-06

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780716734963

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Everyone wonders what tomorrow holds, but what will the real future look like? Not decades or even hundreds of years from now, but thousands or millions of years into the future. Will our species change radically? Or will we become builders of the next dominant intelligence on Earth- the machine? These and other seemingly fantastic scenarios are the very possible realities explored in Peter Ward's Future Evolution, a penetrating look at what might come next in the history of the planet. Looking to the past for clues about the future, Ward describes how the main catalyst for evolutionary change has historically been mass extinction. While many scientist direly predict that humanity will eventually create such a situation, Ward argues that one is already well underway--the extinction of large mammals--and that a new Age of Humanity is coming that will radically revise the diversity of life on Earth. Finally, Ward examines the question of human extinction and reaches the startling conclusion that the likeliest scenario is not our imminent demise but long term survival--perhaps reaching as far as the death of the Sun! Full of Alexis Rockman's breathtaking color images of what animals, plants and other organisms might look like thousands and millions of years from now, Future Evolution takes readers on an incredible journey through time from the deep past into the far future.

Metacommunity Ecology
Metacommunity Ecology

Author: Mathew A. Leibold

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-12-18

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 1400889065

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Metacommunity ecology links smaller-scale processes that have been the provenance of population and community ecology—such as birth-death processes, species interactions, selection, and stochasticity—with larger-scale issues such as dispersal and habitat heterogeneity. Until now, the field has focused on evaluating the relative importance of distinct processes, with niche-based environmental sorting on one side and neutral-based ecological drift and dispersal limitation on the other. This book moves beyond these artificial categorizations, showing how environmental sorting, dispersal, ecological drift, and other processes influence metacommunity structure simultaneously. Mathew Leibold and Jonathan Chase argue that the relative importance of these processes depends on the characteristics of the organisms, the strengths and types of their interactions, the degree of habitat heterogeneity, the rates of dispersal, and the scale at which the system is observed. Using this synthetic perspective, they explore metacommunity patterns in time and space, including patterns of coexistence, distribution, and diversity. Leibold and Chase demonstrate how these processes and patterns are altered by micro- and macroevolution, traits and phylogenetic relationships, and food web interactions. They then use this scale-explicit perspective to illustrate how metacommunity processes are essential for understanding macroecological and biogeographical patterns as well as ecosystem-level processes. Moving seamlessly across scales and subdisciplines, Metacommunity Ecology is an invaluable reference, one that offers a more integrated approach to ecological patterns and processes.