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Consumer Resource Dynamics Mpb 36
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Book Synopsis Consumer-Resource Dynamics (MPB-36) by : William W. Murdoch
Download or read book Consumer-Resource Dynamics (MPB-36) written by William W. Murdoch and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite often violent fluctuations in nature, species extinction is rare. California red scale, a potentially devastating pest of citrus, has been suppressed for fifty years in California to extremely low yet stable densities by its controlling parasitoid. Some larch budmoth populations undergo extreme cycles; others never cycle. In Consumer-Resource Dynamics, William Murdoch, Cherie Briggs, and Roger Nisbet use these and numerous other biological examples to lay the groundwork for a unifying theory applicable to predator-prey, parasitoid-host, and other consumer-resource interactions. Throughout, the focus is on how the properties of real organisms affect population dynamics. The core of the book synthesizes and extends the authors' own models involving insect parasitoids and their hosts, and explores in depth how consumer species compete for a dynamic resource. The emerging general consumer-resource theory accounts for how consumers respond to differences among individuals in the resource population. From here the authors move to other models of consumer-resource dynamics and population dynamics in general. Consideration of empirical examples, key concepts, and a necessary review of simple models is followed by examination of spatial processes affecting dynamics, and of implications for biological control of pest organisms. The book establishes the coherence and broad applicability of consumer-resource theory and connects it to single-species dynamics. It closes by stressing the theory's value as a hierarchy of models that allows both generality and testability in the field.
Book Synopsis Consumer-resource Dynamics by : William W. Murdoch
Download or read book Consumer-resource Dynamics written by William W. Murdoch and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite often violent fluctuations in nature, species extinction is rare. California red scale, a potentially devastating pest of citrus, has been suppressed for fifty years in California to extremely low yet stable densities by its controlling parasitoid. Some larch budmoth populations undergo extreme cycles; others never cycle. In Consumer-Resource Dynamics, William Murdoch, Cherie Briggs, and Roger Nisbet use these and numerous other biological examples to lay the groundwork for a unifying theory applicable to predator-prey, parasitoid-host, and other consumer-resource interactions. Throughout, the focus is on how the properties of real organisms affect population dynamics. The core of the book synthesizes and extends the authors' own models involving insect parasitoids and their hosts, and explores in depth how consumer species compete for a dynamic resource. The emerging general consumer-resource theory accounts for how consumers respond to differences among individuals in the resource population. From here the authors move to other models of consumer-resource dynamics and population dynamics in general. Consideration of empirical examples, key concepts, and a necessary review of simple models is followed by examination of spatial processes affecting dynamics, and of implications for biological control of pest organisms. The book establishes the coherence and broad applicability of consumer-resource theory and connects it to single-species dynamics. It closes by stressing the theory's value as a hierarchy of models that allows both generality and testability in the field.
Book Synopsis Geographical Genetics (MPB-38) by : Bryan K. Epperson
Download or read book Geographical Genetics (MPB-38) written by Bryan K. Epperson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Population genetics has made great strides in applying statistical analysis and mathematical modeling to understand how genes mutate and spread through populations over time. But real populations also live in space. Streams, mountains, and other geographic features often divide populations, limit migration, or otherwise influence gene flow. This book rigorously examines the processes that determine geographic patterns of genetic variation, providing a comprehensive guide to their study and interpretation. Geographical Genetics has a unique focus on the mathematical relationships of spatial statistical measures of patterns to stochastic processes. It also develops the probability and distribution theory of various spatial statistics for analysis of population genetic data, detailing exact methods for using various spatial features to make precise inferences about migration, natural selection, and other dynamic forces. The book also reviews the experimental literature on the types of spatial patterns of genetic variation found within and among populations. And it makes an unprecedented strong connection between observed measures of spatial patterns and those predicted theoretically. Along the way, it introduces readers to the mathematics of spatial statistics, applications to specific population genetic systems, and the relationship between the mathematics of space-time processes and the formal theory of geographical genetics. Written by a leading authority, this is the first comprehensive treatment of geographical genetics. It is a much-needed guide to the theory, techniques, and applications of a field that will play an increasingly important role in population biology and ecology.
Book Synopsis Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species (MPB-41) by : Sergey Gavrilets
Download or read book Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species (MPB-41) written by Sergey Gavrilets and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origin of species has fascinated both biologists and the general public since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Significant progress in understanding the process was achieved in the "modern synthesis," when Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and others reconciled Mendelian genetics with Darwin's natural selection. Although evolutionary biologists have developed significant new theory and data about speciation in the years since the modern synthesis, this book represents the first systematic attempt to summarize and generalize what mathematical models tell us about the dynamics of speciation. Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species presents both an overview of the forty years of previous theoretical research and the author's new results. Sergey Gavrilets uses a unified framework based on the notion of fitness landscapes introduced by Sewall Wright in 1932, generalizing this notion to explore the consequences of the huge dimensionality of fitness landscapes that correspond to biological systems. In contrast to previous theoretical work, which was based largely on numerical simulations, Gavrilets develops simple mathematical models that allow for analytical investigation and clear interpretation in biological terms. Covering controversial topics, including sympatric speciation and the effects of sexual conflict on speciation, this book builds for the first time a general, quantitative theory for the origin of species.
Book Synopsis Mechanistic Home Range Analysis. (MPB-43) by : Paul R. Moorcroft
Download or read book Mechanistic Home Range Analysis. (MPB-43) written by Paul R. Moorcroft and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial patterns of movement are fundamental to the ecology of animal populations, influencing their social organization, mating systems, demography, and the spatial distribution of prey and competitors. However, our ability to understand the causes and consequences of animal home range patterns has been limited by the descriptive nature of the statistical models used to analyze them. In Mechanistic Home Range Analysis, Paul Moorcroft and Mark Lewis develop a radically new framework for studying animal home range patterns based on the analysis of correlated random work models for individual movement behavior. They use this framework to develop a series of mechanistic home range models for carnivore populations. The authors' analysis illustrates how, in contrast to traditional statistical home range models that merely describe pattern, mechanistic home range models can be used to discover the underlying ecological determinants of home range patterns observed in populations, make accurate predictions about how spatial distributions of home ranges will change following environmental or demographic disturbance, and analyze the functional significance of the movement strategies of individuals that give rise to observed patterns of space use. By providing researchers and graduate students of ecology and wildlife biology with a more illuminating way to analyze animal movement, Mechanistic Home Range Analysis will be an indispensable reference for years to come.
Book Synopsis Ecological Niches and Geographic Distributions (MPB-49) by : A. Townsend Peterson
Download or read book Ecological Niches and Geographic Distributions (MPB-49) written by A. Townsend Peterson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-20 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terminology, conceptual overview, biogeography, modeling.
Book Synopsis The Theory of Ecological Communities (MPB-57) by : Mark Vellend
Download or read book The Theory of Ecological Communities (MPB-57) written by Mark Vellend and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Complex Population Dynamics by : Peter Turchin
Download or read book Complex Population Dynamics written by Peter Turchin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do organisms become extremely abundant one year and then seem to disappear a few years later? Why do population outbreaks in particular species happen more or less regularly in certain locations, but only irregularly (or never at all) in other locations? Complex population dynamics have fascinated biologists for decades. By bringing together mathematical models, statistical analyses, and field experiments, this book offers a comprehensive new synthesis of the theory of population oscillations. Peter Turchin first reviews the conceptual tools that ecologists use to investigate population oscillations, introducing population modeling and the statistical analysis of time series data. He then provides an in-depth discussion of several case studies--including the larch budmoth, southern pine beetle, red grouse, voles and lemmings, snowshoe hare, and ungulates--to develop a new analysis of the mechanisms that drive population oscillations in nature. Through such work, the author argues, ecologists can develop general laws of population dynamics that will help turn ecology into a truly quantitative and predictive science. Complex Population Dynamics integrates theoretical and empirical studies into a major new synthesis of current knowledge about population dynamics. It is also a pioneering work that sets the course for ecology's future as a predictive science.
Book Synopsis Food Webs (MPB-50) by : Kevin S. McCann
Download or read book Food Webs (MPB-50) written by Kevin S. McCann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book synthesizes and reconciles modern and classical perspectives into a general unified theory.
Book Synopsis Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy (MPB-39) by : Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Download or read book Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy (MPB-39) written by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1951, the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was teaching in Parma when a student--a priest named Antonio Moroni--told him about rich church records of demography and marriages between relatives. After convincing the Church to open its records, Cavalli-Sforza, Moroni, and Gianna Zei embarked on a landmark study that would last fifty years and cover all of Italy. This book assembles and analyzes the team's research for the first time. Using blood testing as well as church records, the team investigated the frequency of consanguineous marriages and its use for estimating inbreeding and studying the relations between inbreeding and drift. They tested the importance of random genetic drift by studying population structure through demography of the last three centuries, using it to predict the spatial variation of frequencies of genetic markers. The authors find that drift-related genetic variation, including its stabilization by migration, is best predicted by computer simulation. They also analyze the usefulness and limits of the concept of deme for defining Mendelian populations. The genetic effect of consanguineous marriage on recessive genetic diseases and for the detection of dominance in metric characters are also studied. Ultimately bringing together the many strands of their massive project, Cavalli-Sforza, Moroni, and Zei are able to map genetic drift in all of Italy's approximately 8,000 communes and to demonstrate the relationship between each locality's drift and various ecological and demographic factors. In terms of both methods and findings, their accomplishment is tremendously important for understanding human social structure and the genetic effects of drift and inbreeding.
Book Synopsis Resolving Ecosystem Complexity (MPB-47) by : Oswald J. Schmitz
Download or read book Resolving Ecosystem Complexity (MPB-47) written by Oswald J. Schmitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ecosystem's complexity develops from the vast numbers of species interacting in ecological communities. The nature of these interactions, in turn, depends on environmental context. How do these components together influence an ecosystem's behavior as a whole? Can ecologists resolve an ecosystem's complexity in order to predict its response to disturbances? Resolving Ecosystem Complexity develops a framework for anticipating the ways environmental context determines the functioning of ecosystems. Oswald Schmitz addresses the critical questions of contemporary ecology: How should an ecosystem be conceptualized to blend its biotic and biophysical components? How should evolutionary ecological principles be used to derive an operational understanding of complex, adaptive ecosystems? How should the relationship between the functional biotic diversity of ecosystems and their properties be understood? Schmitz begins with the universal concept that ecosystems are comprised of species that consume resources and which are then resources for other consumers. From this, he deduces a fundamental rule or evolutionary ecological mechanism for explaining context dependency: individuals within a species trade off foraging gains against the risk of being consumed by predators. Through empirical examples, Schmitz illustrates how species use evolutionary ecological strategies to negotiate a predator-eat-predator world, and he suggests that the implications of species trade-offs are critical to making ecology a predictive science. Bridging the traditional divides between individuals, populations, and communities in ecology, Resolving Ecosystem Complexity builds a systematic foundation for thinking about natural systems.
Book Synopsis A Theory of Global Biodiversity (MPB-60) by : Boris Worm
Download or read book A Theory of Global Biodiversity (MPB-60) written by Boris Worm and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number of species found at a given point on the planet varies by orders of magnitude, yet large-scale gradients in biodiversity appear to follow some very general patterns. Little mechanistic theory has been formulated to explain the emergence of observed gradients of biodiversity both on land and in the oceans. Based on a comprehensive empirical synthesis of global patterns of species diversity and their drivers, A Theory of Global Biodiversity develops and applies a new theory that can predict such patterns from few underlying processes. The authors show that global patterns of biodiversity fall into four consistent categories, according to where species live: on land or in coastal, pelagic, and deep ocean habitats. The fact that most species groups, from bacteria to whales, appear to follow similar biogeographic patterns of richness within these habitats points toward some underlying structuring principles. Based on empirical analyses of environmental correlates across these habitats, the authors combine aspects of neutral, metabolic, and niche theory into one unifying framework. Applying it to model terrestrial and marine realms, the authors demonstrate that a relatively simple theory that incorporates temperature and community size as driving variables is able to explain divergent patterns of species richness at a global scale. Integrating ecological and evolutionary perspectives, A Theory of Global Biodiversity yields surprising insights into the fundamental mechanisms that shape the distribution of life on our planet.
Download or read book Time in Ecology written by Eric Post and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecologists traditionally regard time as part of the background against which ecological interactions play out. In this book, Eric Post argues that time should be treated as a resource used by organisms for growth, maintenance, and offspring production. Post uses insights from phenology—the study of the timing of life-cycle events—to present a theoretical framework of time in ecology that casts long-standing observations in the field in an entirely new light. Combining conceptual models with field data, he demonstrates how phenological advances, delays, and stasis, documented in an array of taxa, can all be viewed as adaptive components of an organism’s strategic use of time. Post shows how the allocation of time by individual organisms to critical life history stages is not only a response to environmental cues but also an important driver of interactions at the population, species, and community levels. To demonstrate the applications of this exciting new conceptual framework, Time in Ecology uses meta-analyses of previous studies as well as Post’s original data on the phenological dynamics of plants, caribou, and muskoxen in Greenland.
Book Synopsis From Populations to Ecosystems by : Michel Loreau
Download or read book From Populations to Ecosystems written by Michel Loreau and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major subdisciplines of ecology--population ecology, community ecology, ecosystem ecology, and evolutionary ecology--have diverged increasingly in recent decades. What is critically needed today is an integrated, real-world approach to ecology that reflects the interdependency of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. From Populations to Ecosystems proposes an innovative theoretical synthesis that will enable us to advance our fundamental understanding of ecological systems and help us to respond to today's emerging global ecological crisis. Michel Loreau begins by explaining how the principles of population dynamics and ecosystem functioning can be merged. He then addresses key issues in the study of biodiversity and ecosystems, such as functional complementarity, food webs, stability and complexity, material cycling, and metacommunities. Loreau describes the most recent theoretical advances that link the properties of individual populations to the aggregate properties of communities, and the properties of functional groups or trophic levels to the functioning of whole ecosystems, placing special emphasis on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Finally, he turns his attention to the controversial issue of the evolution of entire ecosystems and their properties, laying the theoretical foundations for a genuine evolutionary ecosystem ecology. From Populations to Ecosystems points the way to a much-needed synthesis in ecology, one that offers a fuller understanding of ecosystem processes in the natural world.
Book Synopsis Niche Construction by : F. John Odling-Smee
Download or read book Niche Construction written by F. John Odling-Smee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seemingly innocent observation that the activities of organisms bring about changes in environments is so obvious that it seems an unlikely focus for a new line of thinking about evolution. Yet niche construction--as this process of organism-driven environmental modification is known--has hidden complexities. By transforming biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection in external environments, niche construction generates feedback in evolution on a scale hitherto underestimated--and in a manner that transforms the evolutionary dynamic. It also plays a critical role in ecology, supporting ecosystem engineering and influencing the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Despite this, niche construction has been given short shrift in theoretical biology, in part because it cannot be fully understood within the framework of standard evolutionary theory. Wedding evolution and ecology, this book extends evolutionary theory by formally including niche construction and ecological inheritance as additional evolutionary processes. The authors support their historic move with empirical data, theoretical population genetics, and conceptual models. They also describe new research methods capable of testing the theory. They demonstrate how their theory can resolve long-standing problems in ecology, particularly by advancing the sorely needed synthesis of ecology and evolution, and how it offers an evolutionary basis for the human sciences. Already hailed as a pioneering work by some of the world's most influential biologists, this is a rare, potentially field-changing contribution to the biological sciences.
Download or read book Spatial Ecology written by David Tilman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial Ecology addresses the fundamental effects of space on the dynamics of individual species and on the structure, dynamics, diversity, and stability of multispecies communities. Although the ecological world is unavoidably spatial, there have been few attempts to determine how explicit considerations of space may alter the predictions of ecological models, or what insights it may give into the causes of broad-scale ecological patterns. As this book demonstrates, the spatial structure of a habitat can fundamentally alter both the qualitative and quantitative dynamics and outcomes of ecological processes. Spatial Ecology highlights the importance of space to five topical areas: stability, patterns of diversity, invasions, coexistence, and pattern generation. It illustrates both the diversity of approaches used to study spatial ecology and the underlying similarities of these approaches. Over twenty contributors address issues ranging from the persistence of endangered species, to the maintenance of biodiversity, to the dynamics of hosts and their parasitoids, to disease dynamics, multispecies competition, population genetics, and fundamental processes relevant to all these cases. There have been many recent advances in our understanding of the influence of spatially explicit processes on individual species and on multispecies communities. This book synthesizes these advances, shows the limitations of traditional, non-spatial approaches, and offers a variety of new approaches to spatial ecology that should stimulate ecological research.
Book Synopsis Self-Organization in Complex Ecosystems. (MPB-42) by : Ricard Solé
Download or read book Self-Organization in Complex Ecosystems. (MPB-42) written by Ricard Solé and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can physics be an appropriate framework for the understanding of ecological science? Most ecologists would probably agree that there is little relation between the complexity of natural ecosystems and the simplicity of any example derived from Newtonian physics. Though ecologists have long been interested in concepts originally developed by statistical physicists and later applied to explain everything from why stock markets crash to why rivers develop particular branching patterns, applying such concepts to ecosystems has remained a challenge. Self-Organization in Complex Ecosystems is the first book to clearly synthesize what we have learned about the usefulness of tools from statistical physics in ecology. Ricard Solé and Jordi Bascompte provide a comprehensive introduction to complex systems theory, and ask: do universal laws shape the structure of ecosystems, at least at some scales? They offer the most compelling array of theoretical evidence to date of the potential of nonlinear ecological interactions to generate nonrandom, self-organized patterns at all levels. Tackling classic ecological questions--from population dynamics to biodiversity to macroevolution--the book's novel presentation of theories and data shows the power of statistical physics and complexity in ecology. Self-Organization in Complex Ecosystems will be a staple resource for years to come for ecologists interested in complex systems theory as well as mathematicians and physicists interested in ecology.
