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Author: Kevin S. McCann Publisher: ISBN: 0198824289 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
Theoretical Ecology: concepts and applications continues the authoritative and established sequence of theoretical ecology books initiated by Robert M. May which helped pave the way for ecology to become a more robust theoretical science, encouraging the modern biologist to better understand the mathematics behind their theories. This latest instalment builds on the legacy of its predecessors with a completely new set of contributions. Rather than placing emphasis on the historical ideas in theoretical ecology, the Editors have encouraged each contribution to: synthesize historical theoretical ideas within modern frameworks that have emerged in the last 10-20 years (e.g. bridging population interactions to whole food webs); describe novel theory that has emerged in the last 20 years from historical empirical areas (e.g. macro-ecology); and finally to cover the rapidly expanding area of theoretical ecological applications (e.g. disease theory and global change theory). The result is a forward-looking synthesis that will help guide the field through a further decade of discovery and development. It is written for upper level undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers seeking synthesis and the state of the art in growing areas of interest in theoretical ecology, genetics, evolutionary ecology, and mathematical biology.
Author: Kevin S. McCann Publisher: ISBN: 0198824289 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
Theoretical Ecology: concepts and applications continues the authoritative and established sequence of theoretical ecology books initiated by Robert M. May which helped pave the way for ecology to become a more robust theoretical science, encouraging the modern biologist to better understand the mathematics behind their theories. This latest instalment builds on the legacy of its predecessors with a completely new set of contributions. Rather than placing emphasis on the historical ideas in theoretical ecology, the Editors have encouraged each contribution to: synthesize historical theoretical ideas within modern frameworks that have emerged in the last 10-20 years (e.g. bridging population interactions to whole food webs); describe novel theory that has emerged in the last 20 years from historical empirical areas (e.g. macro-ecology); and finally to cover the rapidly expanding area of theoretical ecological applications (e.g. disease theory and global change theory). The result is a forward-looking synthesis that will help guide the field through a further decade of discovery and development. It is written for upper level undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers seeking synthesis and the state of the art in growing areas of interest in theoretical ecology, genetics, evolutionary ecology, and mathematical biology.
Author: Samuel M. Scheiner Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226736865 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
Despite claims to the contrary, the science of ecology has a long history of building theories. Many ecological theories are mathematical, computational, or statistical, though, and rarely have attempts been made to organize or extrapolate these models into broader theories. The Theory of Ecology brings together some of the most respected and creative theoretical ecologists of this era to advance a comprehensive, conceptual articulation of ecological theories. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, from ecological niche theory to population dynamic theory to island biogeography theory. Collectively, the chapters ably demonstrate how theory in ecology accounts for observations about the natural world and how models provide predictive understandings. It organizes these models into constitutive domains that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of ecological understanding. This book is a milestone in ecological theory and is certain to motivate future empirical and theoretical work in one of the most exciting and active domains of the life sciences.
Author: Alan Hastings Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520269659 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 848
Book Description
"A bold and successful attempt to illustrate the theoretical foundations of all of the subdisciplines of ecology, including basic and applied, and extending through biophysical, population, community, and ecosystem ecology. Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology is a compendium of clear and concise essays by the intellectual leaders across this vast breadth of knowledge."--Harold Mooney, Stanford University "A remarkable and indispensable reference work that also is flexible enough to provide essential readings for a wide variety of courses. A masterful collection of authoritative papers that convey the rich and fundamental nature of modern theoretical ecology."--Simon A. Levin, Princeton University "Theoretical ecologists exercise their imaginations to make sense of the astounding complexity of both real and possible ecosystems. Imagining a real or possible topic left out of the Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology has proven just as challenging. This comprehensive compendium demonstrates that theoretical ecology has become a mature science, and the volume will serve as the foundation for future creativity in this area."--Fred Adler, University of Utah "The editors have assembled an outstanding group of contributors who are a great match for their topics. Sometimes the author is a key, authoritative figure in a field; and at other times, the author has enough distance to convey all sides of a subject. The next time you need to introduce ecology students to a theoretical topic, you'll be glad to have this encyclopedia on your bookshelf."--Stephen Ellner, Cornell University “Everything you wanted to know about theoretical ecology, and much that you didn’t know you needed to know but will now! Alan Hastings and Louis Gross have done us a great service by bringing together in very accessible form a huge amount of information about a broad, complicated, and expanding field.”--Daniel Simberloff, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Author: C.J. Pennycuick Publisher: Elsevier ISBN: 0080557813 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 495
Book Description
This book outlines the principles of flight, of birds in particular. It describes a way of simplifying the mechanics of flight into a practical computer program, which will predict in some detail what any bird, real or hypothetical, can and cannot do. The Flight program, presented on the companion website, generates performance curves for flapping and gliding flight, and simulations of long-distance migration and accounts successfully for the consumption of muscles and other tissues during migratory flights. The program is effectively a working model of a flying bird (or bat or pterosaur) and is the skeleton around which the book is built. The book provides a wider background and then explains how Flight works and shows how to set up and test hypotheses generated by the program.The book and the program are based on adapting the conventional (and well-tested) thinking of aeronautical engineers to the biological problems of bird flight. Their primary aim is to convince biologists that this is the appropriate way to handle problems that involve flight, to make the engineering background accessible to biologists, and to provide a tool kit in the shape of the Flight program, which they can use to solve practical problems involving bird flight and migration. In addition, the book will be readily accessible to engineers who want to know how birds work, and should be of interest to the ever-growing community working on flapping "micro air vehicles" (MAVs). The program can be used to predict the flight performance and capabilities of reconstructed fossil birds and pterosaurs, flying in ancient atmospheres that differ from present conditions, and also, of course, to predict and account for the results of experiments and observations on living birds and bats.* An up to date work by the world's leading expert on bird flight* Examines the biology and biomechanics of bird flight with added reference to the flight of bats and pterosaurs.* Uses proven aeronautical principles to help solve biological issues in understanding and predicting the flight capabilities of birds and other vertebrates.* Provides insights into the evolution of flight and the likely capabilities of extinct birds and reptiles.* Gives a detailed explanation of the science behind, and use of, the author's predictive bird flight simulation program - Flight - which is available on a companion website.* Presents often difficult concepts in easily understood language.
Author: Goran I. Agren Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521646512 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
The cycling of elements such as carbon and nitrogen is of central importance in ecology, particularly when humans are causing changes to element cycles on a global scale. In this 1996 book a rigorous mathematical framework is developed to model how element cycles operate and interact in plants and soils, forming the foundations of a new ecosystem theory. From a few basic equations, powerful predictions can be generated covering a wide range of ecological phenomena related to element cycling. These predictions are tested extensively against field and laboratory studies of agricultural and forest ecosystems. This work will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in theoretical ecology, soil science, forestry and biogeochemistry.
Author: Mark Vellend Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691208999 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
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.
Author: Amos H. Hawley Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226319849 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay, by Amos Hawley, presents for the first time a unified theory of human ecology by a scholar whose name is virtually synonymous with the discipline. Focused on the interaction between society and environment, human ecology is an attempt to deal holistically with the phenomenon of human organization. Beginning in the first quarter of the century, sociologists such as Park, Burgess, and McKenzie developed the study of human ecology to account for the dynamics of change in American cities. Over time, theorists have reached beyond the boundaries of sociology, drawing on the findings of economics, political science, anthropology, and bioecology, to understand the relationship of human beings to their environment. Hawley has successfully integrated the scattered theses of this wide-ranging discipline into a schematic whole. The early human ecologists seized on the analogy of plant communities as a way of understanding urban communities. Hawley here maintains that the most important contribution to human ecology of the lexicons of plant and animal ecologies is the perspective of collective life as an adaptive process consisting in an interaction of environment, population, and organization. From the adaptive profess, he argues, emerges the ecosystem, a concept that serves as a common denominator for bioecology and human ecology. Hawley has codified the theory of human ecology by a set of deductive hypotheses that establish its claims to coherence and comprehensiveness. His model charts a synthesis of ecological concepts ranging from adaptation and equilibrium through growth in temporal and spatial dimensions to convergence and openness. The essay underscores the critical importance of transportation and communication technology to the shaping of the human ecological system. Human Ecology brings concision and elegance to this holistic perspective and will serve as a point of reference and orientation for anyone interested in the powers and scope of the ecological approach.
Author: Marc Mangel Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139455869 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 323
Book Description
Mathematical modelling is widely used in ecology and evolutionary biology and it is a topic that many biologists find difficult to grasp. In this new textbook Marc Mangel provides a no-nonsense introduction to the skills needed to understand the principles of theoretical and mathematical biology. Fundamental theories and applications are introduced using numerous examples from current biological research, complete with illustrations to highlight key points. Exercises are also included throughout the text to show how theory can be applied and to test knowledge gained so far. Suitable for advanced undergraduate courses in theoretical and mathematical biology, this book forms an essential resource for anyone wanting to gain an understanding of theoretical ecology and evolution.
Author: Kevin S. McCann
Author: Kevin S. McCann
Author: Samuel M. Scheiner
Author: Alan Hastings
Author: C.J. Pennycuick
Author: Robert McCredie May
Author: Goran I. Agren
Author: Peter Yodzis
Author: Mark Vellend
Author: Amos H. Hawley
Author: Marc Mangel