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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.
"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.
This work is the first to focus systematically on a much-debated topic: the conceptual issues of community ecology, including the nature of evidence in ecology, the role of experiments, attempts to disprove hypotheses, and the value of negative evidence in the discipline. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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.
"Scale - the understanding of ecological phenomena through levels of biological organization across time and space - is one of most important concepts in ecology. It is often challenging for ecologists to find systems that lend themselves to study across scales; however, Sarracenia, a pitcher plant indigenous to the eastern United States, is unique because it can be studied at a hierarchy of scales: individuals, communities, and whole ecosystems. Ecologists Aaron Ellison and Nicolas Gotelli have studied Sarracenia for decades and, in this book, they synthesize their research and show how this system can inform the broad and challenging question of scaling in ecology. The authors' goal is to deepen the current understanding of major ecological processes, and how they operate across scales"--
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.
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.
A comprehensive framework for understanding species coexistence Coexistence is the central concept in community ecology, but an understanding of this concept requires that we study the actual mechanisms of species interactions. Coexistence in Ecology examines the major features of these mechanisms for species that coexist at different positions in complex food webs, and derives empirical tests from model predictions. Exploring the various challenges species face, Mark McPeek systematically builds a model food web, beginning with an ecosystem devoid of life and then adding one species at a time. With the introduction of each new species, he evaluates the properties it must possess to invade a community and quantifies the changes in the abundances of other species that result from a successful invasion. McPeek continues this process until he achieves a multitrophic level food web with many species coexisting at each trophic level, from omnivores, mutualists, and pathogens to herbivores, carnivores, and basic plants. He then describes the observational and experimental empirical studies that can test the theoretical predictions resulting from the model analyses. Synthesizing decades of theoretical research in community ecology, Coexistence in Ecology offers new perspectives on how to develop an empirical program of study rooted in the natural histories of species and the mechanisms by which they actually interact with one another.
The ‘Aquatic Habitat Conservation in South America’ Symposium occurred during the XXI Brazilian Society of Ichthyology Meeting. The proceedings were published as a special issue in the Journal of Fish Biology (vol. 89, Number 1, June 2016). In this special issue, authors provided an analytical overview of problems faced by the conservation of fishes and aquatic habitats of South America. Habitat loss emerged as the greatest concern for all South American aquatic ecosystems, with a long list of causes related to unsustainable development models. Based on this finding, we would like to extend this topic to other continents, different climates, fauna and flora around the world. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of variables that influence flora and fauna distributions and shape their ecological interactions within aquatic ecosystems
With more than two hundred species distributed from California through Texas and across most of mainland Mexico, Central and South America, and islands in the Caribbean Sea, the Phyllostomidae bat family (American leaf-nosed bats) is one of the world’s most diverse mammalian families. From an insectivorous ancestor, species living today, over about 30 million years, have evolved a hyper-diverse range of diets, from blood or small vertebrates, to consuming nectar, pollen, and fruit. Phyllostomid plant-visiting species are responsible for pollinating more than five hundred species of neotropical shrubs, trees, vines, and epiphytes—many of which are economically and ecologically important—and they also disperse the seeds of at least another five hundred plant species. Fruit-eating and seed-dispersing members of this family thus play a crucial role in the regeneration of neotropical forests, and the fruit eaters are among the most abundant mammals in these habitats. Coauthored by leading experts in the field and synthesizing the latest advances in molecular biology and ecological methods, Phyllostomid Bats is the first overview in more than forty years of the evolution of the many morphological, behavioral, physiological, and ecological adaptations in this family. Featuring abundant illustrations as well as details on the current conservation status of phyllostomid species, it is both a comprehensive reference for these ecologically vital creatures and a fascinating exploration of the evolutionary process of adaptive radiation.