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One of the central questions of ecology is why there are so many different kinds of plants and animals. Here David Tilman presents a theory of how organisms compete for resources and the way their competition promotes diversity. Developing Hutchinson's suggestion that the main cause of diversity is the feeding relations of species, this book builds a mechanistic, resource-based explanation of the structure and functioning of ecological communities. In a detailed analysis of the Park Grass Experiments at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in England, the author demonstrates that the dramatic results of these 120 years of experimentation are consistent with his theory, as are observations in many other natural communities. The consumer-resource approach of this book is applicable to both animal and plant communities, but the majority of Professor Tilman's discussion concentrates on the structure of plant communities. All theoretical arguments are developed graphically, and formal mathematics is kept to a minimum. The final chapters of the book provide some testable speculations about resources and animal communities and explore such problems as the evolution of "super species," the differences between plant and animal community diversity patterns, and the cause of plant succession.
Biological diversity, the variety of living organisms on Earth, is traditionally viewed as the diversity of taxa, and species in particular. However, other facets of diversity also need to be considered for a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes. This novel book demonstrates the advantages of adopting a functional approach to diversity in order to improve our understanding of the functioning of ecological systems and theircomponents. The focus is on plants, which are major components of these systems, and for which the functional approach has led to major scientific advances over the last 20 years. PlantFunctional Diversity presents the rationale for a trait-based approach to functional diversity in the context of comparative plant ecology and agroecology. It demonstrates how this approach can be used to address a number of highly debated questions in plant ecology pertaining to plant responses to their environment, controls on plant community structure, ecosystem properties, and the services these deliver to human societies. This research level text will be of particular relevance and use tograduate students and professional researchers in plant ecology, agricultural sciences and conservation biology.
Analysis of Ecological Communities offers a rationale and guidance for selecting appropriate, effective, analytical methods in community ecology. The book is suitable as a textbook and reference book on methods for multivariate analysis of ecological communities and their environments. The book covers distance measures, data transformation, outlier analysis, coordination, cluster analysis, PCA RA, CA, DCA, NMS, NMS, CCA, Bray-Curtis, MRPP, Mantel test, discriminant analysis, twinspan, classification and regression trees, structural equation modeling, and more. It also includes brief treatments of community sampling and diversity measures. The 304 page book is richly illustrated. It provides many examples from the literature and demonstrations of basic principles with simulated and real data sets.
"Chapter 1 establishes the context of such a search for pattern, presenting essential definitions and exploring early work on community structure and organization. The various biotic and abiotic factors which may influence communities and their dynamics are reviewed in Chapter 2, while the way in which the interrelationships between organisms are structured within the community in food webs or in the partitioning of available resources are considered in separate chapters on food webs, niche relationships and species guilds. Later chapters explore the factors determining the assembly of communities, species composition and pattern of relative abundance and the relative roles of deterministic and stochastic processes in determining community structure. The concluding section explores the implications of observed patterns of structure and organization for stability. The mathematical analyses which are an essential component of this topic are included only where essential for understanding and are presented in special box features. Each mathematical section has been carefully structured and fully explained in biological terms. Community Ecology presents a refreshingly readable course text for advanced undergraduates in ecology."--BOOK JACKET.
During the past two decades, there has been a gradual change of emphasis in ecological studies directed at unravelling the complexity of natural communities. Initially, the population approach was used, where interest lay in the way individual populations change and in the identification of factors af fecting these changes. A good understanding of the dynamics of single populations is now emerging, but this has not been a very fruitful approach at the community level. In the natural world, few species can be treated as isolated populations, as most single species are the interacting parts of multispecies systems. This has led to a community approach, involving the study of interrelationships between species within com munities and investigation of the actual organization of natural communities as a whole. The formalization of a number of new concepts and ideas has evolved from this approach, including niche theory, resource allocation, guild structure, limiting similarity, niche width and overlap etc. , which, until fairly recently, have been examined mainly from a theoretical point of view. However, a wealth of field data is gradually being added to the literature, especially from the general areas of island biogeography and resource partitioning amongst closely related species. Community structure embodies patterns of resource allocation and spatial and temporal abundance of species of the community, as well a. '1 community level properties such as trophic levels, succession, nutrient cycling etc.
In this study, microorganisms are vital in mediating the earth's biogeochemical cycles; yet, despite our rapidly increasing ability to explore complex environmental microbial communities, the relationship between microbial community structure and ecosystem processes remains poorly understood. Here, we address a fundamental and unanswered question in microbial ecology: 'When do we need to understand microbial community structure to accurately predict function?' We present a statistical analysis investigating the value of environmental data and microbial community structure independently and in combination for explaining rates of carbon and nitrogen cycling processes within 82 global datasets. Environmental variables were the strongest predictors of process rates but left 44% of variation unexplained on average, suggesting the potential for microbial data to increase model accuracy. Although only 29% of our datasets were significantly improved by adding information on microbial community structure, we observed improvement in models of processes mediated by narrow phylogenetic guilds via functional gene data, and conversely, improvement in models of facultative microbial processes via community diversity metrics. Our results also suggest that microbial diversity can strengthen predictions of respiration rates beyond microbial biomass parameters, as 53% of models were improved by incorporating both sets of predictors compared to 35% by microbial biomass alone. Our analysis represents the first comprehensive analysis of research examining links between microbial community structure and ecosystem function. Taken together, our results indicate that a greater understanding of microbial communities informed by ecological principles may enhance our ability to predict ecosystem process rates relative to assessments based on environmental variables and microbial physiology.
All life is chemical. That fact underpins the developing field of ecological stoichiometry, the study of the balance of chemical elements in ecological interactions. This long-awaited book brings this field into its own as a unifying force in ecology and evolution. Synthesizing a wide range of knowledge, Robert Sterner and Jim Elser show how an understanding of the biochemical deployment of elements in organisms from microbes to metazoa provides the key to making sense of both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. After summarizing the chemistry of elements and their relative abundance in Earth's environment, the authors proceed along a line of increasing complexity and scale from molecules to cells, individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems. The book examines fundamental chemical constraints on ecological phenomena such as competition, herbivory, symbiosis, energy flow in food webs, and organic matter sequestration. In accessible prose and with clear mathematical models, the authors show how ecological stoichiometry can illuminate diverse fields of study, from metabolism to global change. Set to be a classic in the field, Ecological Stoichiometry is an indispensable resource for researchers, instructors, and students of ecology, evolution, physiology, and biogeochemistry. From the foreword by Peter Vitousek: ? "[T]his book represents a significant milestone in the history of ecology. . . . Love it or argue with it--and I do both--most ecologists will be influenced by the framework developed in this book. . . . There are points to question here, and many more to test . . . And if we are both lucky and good, this questioning and testing will advance our field beyond the level achieved in this book. I can't wait to get on with it."
Does biodiversity influence how ecosystems function? Might diversity loss affect the ability of ecosystems to deliver services of benefit to humankind? Ecosystems provide food, fuel, fiber, and drinkable water, regulate local and regional climate, and recycle needed nutrients, among other things. An ecosyste's ability to sustain functioning may depend on the number of species residing in the ecosystem--its biological diversity--but this has been a controversial hypothesis. There are many unanswered questions about how and why changes in biodiversity could alter ecosystem functioning. This volume, written by top researchers, synthesizes empirical studies on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and extends that knowledge using a novel and coordinated set of models and theoretical approaches. These experimental and theoretical analyses demonstrate that functioning usually increases with biodiversity, but also reveals when and under what circumstances other relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning might occur. It also accounts for apparent changes in diversity-functioning relationships that emerge over time in disturbed ecosystems, thereby addressing a major controversy in the field. The volume concludes with a blueprint for moving beyond small-scale studies to regional ones--a move of enormous significance for policy and conservation but one that will entail tackling some of the most fundamental challenges in ecology. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Juan Armesto, Claudia Neuhauser, Andy Hector, Clarence Lehman, Peter Kareiva, Sharon Lawler, Peter Chesson, Teri Balser, Mary K. Firestone, Robert Holt, Michel Loreau, Johannes Knops, David Wedin, Peter Reich, Shahid Naeem, Bernhard Schmid, Jasmin Joshi, and Felix Schläpfer.
"Ecosystem" 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.