Scale Heterogeneity And The Structure And Diversity Of Ecological Communities
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Scale Heterogeneity And The Structure And Diversity Of Ecological Communities
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Author : Mark E. Ritchie
language : en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date : 2009-09-28
Scale Heterogeneity And The Structure And Diversity Of Ecological Communities written by Mark E. Ritchie and has been published by Princeton University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-09-28 with Science categories.
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.
The Ecological Consequences Of Environmental Heterogeneity
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Author : British Ecological Society. Symposium
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2000-08
The Ecological Consequences Of Environmental Heterogeneity written by British Ecological Society. Symposium and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2000-08 with Nature categories.
A wide-ranging review of the effects of heterogeneity on individuals, populations, communities and biodiversity.
Metacommunities
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Author : Marcel Holyoak
language : en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date : 2005-10
Metacommunities written by Marcel Holyoak and has been published by University of Chicago Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2005-10 with Nature categories.
Takes the hallmarks of metapopulation theory to the next level by considering a group of communities, each of which may contain numerous populations, connected by species interactions within communities and the movement of individuals between communities. This book seeks to understand how communities work in fragmented landscapes.
Ecological Heterogeneity
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Author : Jurek Kolasa
language : en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date : 2012-12-06
Ecological Heterogeneity written by Jurek Kolasa and has been published by Springer Science & Business Media this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-12-06 with Science categories.
An attractive, promising, and frustrating feature of ecology is its complex ity, both conceptual and observational. Increasing acknowledgment of the importance of scale testifies to the shifting focus in large areas of ecology. In the rush to explore problems of scale, another general aspect of ecolog ical systems has been given less attention. This aspect, equally important, is heterogeneity. Its importance lies in the ubiquity of heterogeneity as a feature of ecological systems and in the number of questions it raises questions to which answers are not readily available. What is heterogeneity? Does it differ from complexity? What dimensions need be considered to evaluate heterogeneity ade quately? Can heterogeneity be measured at various scales? Is heterogeneity apart of organization of ecological systems? How does it change in time and space? What are the causes of heterogeneity and causes of its change? This volume attempts to answer these questions. It is devoted to iden tification of the meaning, range of applications, problems, and methodol ogy associated with the study of heterogeneity. The coverage is thus broad and rich, and the contributing authors have been encouraged to range widely in discussions and reflections. vi Preface The chapters are grouped into themes. The first group focuses on the conceptual foundations (Chapters 1-5). These papers exarnine the meaning of the term, historical developments, and relations to scale. The second theme is modeling population and interspecific interactions in hetero geneous environments (Chapters 6 and 7).
Metacommunity Ecology Volume 59
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Author : Mathew A. Leibold
language : en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date : 2018
Metacommunity Ecology Volume 59 written by Mathew A. Leibold and has been published by Princeton University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with Science categories.
Metacommunity ecology links smaller-scale processes that have been the provenance of population and community ecology—such as birth-death processes, species interactions, selection, and stochasticity—with larger-scale issues such as dispersal and habitat heterogeneity. Until now, the field has focused on evaluating the relative importance of distinct processes, with niche-based environmental sorting on one side and neutral-based ecological drift and dispersal limitation on the other. This book moves beyond these artificial categorizations, showing how environmental sorting, dispersal, ecological drift, and other processes influence metacommunity structure simultaneously. Mathew Leibold and Jonathan Chase argue that the relative importance of these processes depends on the characteristics of the organisms, the strengths and types of their interactions, the degree of habitat heterogeneity, the rates of dispersal, and the scale at which the system is observed. Using this synthetic perspective, they explore metacommunity patterns in time and space, including patterns of coexistence, distribution, and diversity. Leibold and Chase demonstrate how these processes and patterns are altered by micro- and macroevolution, traits and phylogenetic relationships, and food web interactions. They then use this scale-explicit perspective to illustrate how metacommunity processes are essential for understanding macroecological and biogeographical patterns as well as ecosystem-level processes. Moving seamlessly across scales and subdisciplines, Metacommunity Ecology is an invaluable reference, one that offers a more integrated approach to ecological patterns and processes.
Species Diversity In Ecological Communities
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Author : Robert E. Ricklefs
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1993
Species Diversity In Ecological Communities written by Robert E. Ricklefs and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1993 with Science categories.
A pioneering work, Species Diversity in Ecological Communities looks at biodiversity in its broadest geographical and historical contexts. For many decades, ecologists have studied only small areas over short time spans in the belief that diversity is regulated by local ecological interactions. However, to understand fully how communities come to have the diversity they do, and to properly address urgent conservation problems, scientists must consider global patterns of species richness and the historical events that shape both regional and local communities. The authors use new theoretical developments, analyses, and case studies to explore the large-scale mechanisms that generate and maintain diversity. Case studies of various regions and organisms consider how local and regional processes interact to determine patterns of species richness. The contributors emphasize the fact that ecological processes acting quickly on a local scale do not erase the effects of regional and historical events that occur more slowly and less frequently. This book compels scientists to rethink the foundations of community ecology and sets the stage for further research using comparative, experimental, geographical, and historical data.
The Theory Of Ecological Communities Mpb 57
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Author : Mark Vellend
language : en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date : 2020-09-15
The Theory Of Ecological Communities Mpb 57 written by Mark Vellend and has been published by Princeton University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-09-15 with Science categories.
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.
Resource Competition And Community Structure Mpb 17 Volume 17
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Author : David Tilman
language : en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date : 2020-03-31
Resource Competition And Community Structure Mpb 17 Volume 17 written by David Tilman and has been published by Princeton University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-03-31 with Science categories.
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
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Author : Michael A. Huston
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 1994-09-15
Biological Diversity written by Michael A. Huston and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1994-09-15 with Nature categories.
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.
Disturbance Ecology And Biological Diversity
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Author : Erik A. Beever
language : en
Publisher: CRC Press
Release Date : 2019-10-30
Disturbance Ecology And Biological Diversity written by Erik A. Beever and has been published by CRC Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019-10-30 with Nature categories.
This book presents cascading effects of ecological disturbances on a multitude of ecosystem components. It includes agricultural development, large infrequent disturbances, forest harvesting, non-native grazing in deserts, ground transportation, powerline corridors, fires, urban ecology, disturbance in aquatic ecosystems, land-use dynamics on diversity, habitat fragmentation, sedimentation of wetlands, and contemporary climate change. The book facilitates users in understanding why disturbances are occurring while recommending mitigation and remediation strategies.