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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.
Although the majority of the world’s forest ecosystems are dominated by uneven-sized multi-species stands, forest management practice and theory has focused on the development of plantation monocultures to maximize the supply of timber at low cost. Societal expectations are changing, however, and uneven-aged multi-species ecosystems, selectively managed as Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF), are often believed to be superior to monocultures in addressing a wide range of expectations. This book presents methods which are relevant to CCF management and planning: analysing forest structures, silvicultural and planning, economic evaluation, based on examples in Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America.
This volume addresses the role of chief diversity officers as coordinating and integrating diversity leaders in higher education and other sectors.Having established in a companion volume the parameters for an effective diversity strategy, the authors address such questions as: What is a chief diversity officer? How might we create dynamic chief diversity officer infrastructures? What models of CDO structure exist in the academy? What misperceptions often confound the work of officers and the institutions they work within? What key competencies are necessary to lead as a CDO? How does the CDO role compare across higher education, non-profit, and corporate sectors? And how might the role serve as an important contributor to a collaborative vision for change and transformation in the academy?This book begins by delineating the evolution of the chief diversity officer role in the academy. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative research on CDOs conducted for the purposes of this volume, it describes how the scope and responsibilities are variously defined at the organizations where the position has been created, and offers insights into the complexities and challenges of the role.On the basis of this data and the literature on organizational design and change management, the authors define the requisite skills, knowledge and background to be effective, review the alternative organizational and governance structures under which CDOs operate, and in so doing present the Chief Diversity Officer Development Framework as a basis for recruiting candidates, for structuring the position to succeed, and for providing prospective and incumbent CDOs with a realistic sense of the scope of the role.This title is also available in a set with its companion volume, Strategic Diversity Leadership.
The key to preserving and managing biodiversity is understanding which processes are important at different scales, and how changes affect different components of biodiversity. In this book, existing theories on diversity are synthesised into a logical framework. Global and landscape-scale patterns of biodiversity are described in the first section. In the second, the spatial and temporal dynamics of diversity are emphasised. The third section develops an integrated set of mechanistic explanations for diversity patterns at the levels of population, community, ecosystem and landscape. Finally, case studies examine diversity patterns in marine and terrestrial ecosystems and the effects of biological invasions. The book concludes with a discussion of the economics of preserving biological diversity. This book will interest research workers and students of ecology, biology and conservation.
This second of two volumes on Plant Genome Diversity provides, in 20 chapters, insights into the structural evolution of plant genomes with all its variations. Starting with an outline of plant phylogeny and its reconstruction, the second part of the volume describes the architecture and dynamics of the plant cell nucleus, the third examines the evolution and diversity of the karyotype in various lineages, including angiosperms, gymnosperms and monilophytes. The fourth part presents the mechanisms of polyploidization and its biological consequences and significance for land plant evolution. The fifth part deals with genome size evolution and its biological significance. Together with Volume I, this comprehensive book on the plant genome is intended for students and professionals in all fields of plant science, offering as it does a convenient entry into a burgeoning literature in a fast-moving field.
This book presents new theoretical perspectives on ecological community dynamics and in so doing casts fresh light on the enduring complexity–stability debate. Real ecological communities do not simply comprise diverse species and interactions, which respectively represented the nodes and links of the classic network theory. Rather, they are characterized by different types of complexity, and this book explains how this diversity of complexity is key to understanding the dynamics of ecological communities. It is shown how various properties in natural communities, such as life history, adaptation, density dependence, sex, interaction types, space, functional traits, and microbial processes, can dramatically increase the complexity in ecological communities. Furthermore, innovative methods are introduced that may be applied to cast light on very complex communities. With each chapter presenting the latest advances and approaches, the book sets the direction for future research on ecological community dynamics. It will be a “must read” for researchers and students in the field of ecology.
Understanding and predicting species diversity in ecological communities is one of the great challenges in community ecology. Popular recent theory contends that the traits of species are "neutral" or unimportant to coexistence, yet abundant experimental evidence suggests that multiple species are able to coexist on the same limiting resource precisely because they differ in key traits, such as body size, diet, and resource demand. This book presents a new theory of coexistence that incorporates two important aspects of biodiversity in nature--scale and spatial variation in the supply of limiting resources. Introducing an innovative model that uses fractal geometry to describe the complex physical structure of nature, Mark Ritchie shows how species traits, particularly body size, lead to spatial patterns of resource use that allow species to coexist. He explains how this criterion for coexistence can be converted into a "rule" for how many species can be "packed" into an environment given the supply of resources and their spatial variability. He then demonstrates how this rule can be used to predict a range of patterns in ecological communities, such as body-size distributions, species-abundance distributions, and species-area relations. Ritchie illustrates how the predictions closely match data from many real communities, including those of mammalian herbivores, grasshoppers, dung beetles, and birds. This book offers a compelling alternative to "neutral" theory in community ecology, one that helps us better understand patterns of biodiversity across the Earth.
Diversity research and scholarship has evolved over the past several decades and is now reaching a critical juncture. While the scholarship on diversity and inclusion has advanced within various disciplines and subdisciplines, there have been limited conversations and collaborations across distinct areas of research. Theories, paradigms, research models and methodologies have evolved but continue to remain locked within specific area, disciplines, or theoretical canons. This collaborative edited volume examines diversity across disciplines in higher education. Our book brings together contributions from the arts, sciences, and professional fields. In order to advance diversity and inclusion across campuses, multiple disciplinary perspectives need to be acknowledged and considered broadly. The current higher education climate necessitates multicultural and interdisciplinary collaboration. Global partnerships and technological advances require faculty, administrators, and graduate students to reach beyond their disciplinary focus to achieve successful programs and research projects. We need to become more familiar discussing diversity across disciplines. Our book investigates diversity across disciplines with attention to people, process, policies, and paradigms. The four thematic categories of people, process, policies, and paradigms describe the multidisciplinary nature of diversity and topics relevant to faculty, administrators, and students in higher education. The framework provides a structure to understand the ways in which people are impacted by diversity and the complicated process of engaging with diversity in a variety of contexts. Policies draw attention to the dynamic nature of diversity across disciplines and paradigms presents models of diversity in research and education.
The Science of Diversity uses a multidisciplinary approach to excavate the theories, principles, and paradigms that illuminate our understanding of the issues surrounding human diversity, social equality, and justice. The book brings these to the surface holistically, examining diversity at the individual, interpersonal, and international levels. Shedding light on why diversity programs fail, the book provides tools to understand how biases develop and influence our relationships and interactions with others.
This book provides an introduction to the role of diversity in complex adaptive systems. A complex system--such as an economy or a tropical ecosystem--consists of interacting adaptive entities that produce dynamic patterns and structures. Diversity plays a different role in a complex system than it does in an equilibrium system, where it often merely produces variation around the mean for performance measures. In complex adaptive systems, diversity makes fundamental contributions to system performance. Scott Page gives a concise primer on how diversity happens, how it is maintained, and how it affects complex systems. He explains how diversity underpins system level robustness, allowing for multiple responses to external shocks and internal adaptations; how it provides the seeds for large events by creating outliers that fuel tipping points; and how it drives novelty and innovation. Page looks at the different kinds of diversity--variations within and across types, and distinct community compositions and interaction structures--and covers the evolution of diversity within complex systems and the factors that determine the amount of maintained diversity within a system. Provides a concise and accessible introduction Shows how diversity underpins robustness and fuels tipping points Covers all types of diversity The essential primer on diversity in complex adaptive systems