Bücher der Reihe Monographs in Population Biology

"e;Ecosystem"e; is an intuitively appealing concept to most ecologists, but, in spite of its widespread use, the term remains diffuse and ambiguous. The authors of this book argue that previous attempts to define the concept have been derived from particular viewpoints to the exclusion of others equally possible. They offer instead a more general line of thought based on hierarchy theory. Their contribution should help to counteract the present separation of subdisciplines in ecology and to bring functional and population/community ecologists closer to a common approach. Developed as a way of understanding highly complex organized systems, hierarchy theory has at its center the idea that organization results from differences in process rates. To the authors the theory suggests an objective way of decomposing ecosystems into their component parts. The results thus obtained offer a rewarding method for integrating various schools of ecology.

Examines theories of population stability and shows how laboratory research on model populations - particularly blowflies, Tribolium, and Drosophila - contributes to our understanding of population dynamics and the evolution of stability. This book analyzes techniques for inferring whether a given population is in balance or not.

Aiming to encourage the exchange of ideas among scientists involved in the management of fisheries, wildlife, forest stands, and pest control, this work presents a general framework for modeling populations that reproduce seasonally and that have age or stage structure as an essential component of management strategy.

Florida Scrub Jays are an excellent example of a cooperative-breeding species. This book provides data on fecundity, survivorship, relatedness, and dispersal to establish the demographic milieu and to address questions arising out of observed helping behavior - whom, how, when, and why the helpers help.

Explores how blackbirds utilize their marsh environments during the breeding season. This work uses models derived from Darwin's theory of natural selection to predict the behavior and morphology of individuals as well as the statistical properties of their populations. It also provides an overview of the structure of bird communities in marshes.

Presents the results of more than 25 years of studying plant-insect interactions. This book addresses specific theories and concepts that have guided biological research for more than two decades and to engage general problems in evolutionary biology. It is useful to those involved in studying the ways in which interdependent species interact.

Shows that the overall dynamical behavior of populations must be understood in terms of the behavior of individuals. The author contends that further progress in population ecology requires taking into account individual differences other than sex, age, and taxonomic affiliation - unequal access to resources, for instance.

Discusses the methods and problems involved in the demonstration and measurement of natural selection. This work presents the critical evidence for its existence, and places it in an evolutionary perspective. It argues that natural selection can explain the change of frequencies of variants, but not their origins.

Presents a study of arthropod predador-prey systems. This work shows how many of the components of predation may be simply modeled in order to reveal their effects on the overall dynamics of the interacting populations. It also describes how the biological processes of insect predator-prey, including host-parasitoid interactions may be understood.

Explores the origins and development of geographic variation, divergence, and speciation. This work shows how geographic differentiation and speciation may develop in spite of continuous gene flow. It discusses the relationships among gene flow, dispersal, and migration.

Emphasizes the role of competition at levels above single species populations, and describes how competition, by way of the niche concept, determines the structure of communities. This work draws most examples from eleven North and South American bird communities, although the concepts and methodology are far more general.

Most organisms live in a seasonal environment. During their life cycles, some species face seasons of breeding and nonbreeding. This work analyzes the complex interaction between a population and a regularly varying environment in an attempt to define and measure seasonality as a critical parameter in the general theory of population regulation.

Through use of the models Professor Horn has devised, plant ecologists, foresters, and botanists will be able to predict the growth and productivity of a forest, the invading and senile species in a forest, the effect of shade tolerance on forest succession, and similar questions.

Providing a theory to predict the evolution of plant traits, this book explores the effects of these on plant community structure and dynamics. It also includes the constraint and tradeoff theory and suggests that most field experiments have been of too short a duration to allow unambiguous interpretation of their results.

Presents a technique for obtaining a partial answer to this elementary question about niche space. This work also discusses other features of real food webs, including the constant ratio of the number of kinds of prey to the number of kinds of predators in food webs that describe a community.

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.

The modern ecologist usually works in both the field and laboratory, uses statistics and computers, and often works with ecological concepts that are model-based, if not model-driven. How do we make the field and laboratory coherent? How do we link models and data? How do we use statistics to help experimentation? How do we integrate modeling and statistics? How do we confront multiple hypotheses with data and assign degrees of belief to different hypotheses? How do we deal with time series (in which data are linked from one measurement to the next) or put multiple sources of data into one inferential framework? These are the kinds of questions asked and answered by The Ecological Detective. Ray Hilborn and Marc Mangel investigate ecological data much as a detective would investigate a crime scene by trying different hypotheses until a coherent picture emerges. The book is not a set of pat statistical procedures but rather an approach. The Ecological Detective makes liberal use of computer programming for the generation of hypotheses, exploration of data, and the comparison of different models. The authors' attitude is one of exploration, both statistical and graphical. The background required is minimal, so that students with an undergraduate course in statistics and ecology can profitably add this work to their tool-kit for solving ecological problems.

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.