First Ecology

How much do we know about the living world? Enough to predict its future? First Ecology: ecological principles and environmental issues provides a critical and evaluative introduction to the science of ecology. Alan Beeby and Anne-Maria Brennan present a succinct survey of ecology, describing and explaining the relationship between living organisms and their environment. The third edition of this popular book continues to introduce ecology from a human perspective. This view of humanity as part of the ecology of the planet makes the fundamental relevance of ecology to all life science students apparent throughout. First Ecology develops in sequence the core themes in ecology at each level of organisation - subcellular, population, ecosystem, landscape and planetary. Understanding this hierarchy - and the interplay between these levels - is crucial to the environmental decisions our species faces at the start of the twenty-first century. First Ecology is the ideal primer for you to develop this understanding. Online Resource Centre: The Online Resource Centre features the following materials: For lecturers (password protected): · A virtual field course comprising a series of basic exercises using real data helps students prepare for, and gain more from, their time in the field · Figures from the book, available to download to facilitate lecture preparation · PowerPoint slides introducing key concepts, supported with integrated figures from the book, help to save time in preparing and planning lectures · Routes help students follow and understand various themes and connections throughout the book and offer schemes for independent study · Answers to exercises provided in the book For students: · Hyperlinks to the primary literature cited in the book to facilitate access to original research papers · Routes map out how key themes are developed throughout the book . Web link library of all the URLs included in the book, together with additional web links on specific topics

Ecology is capturing the popular imagination like never before, with issues such as climate change, species extinctions, and habitat destruction becoming ever more prominent. At the same time, the science of ecology has advanced dramatically, growing in mathematical and theoretical sophistication. Here, two leading experts present the fundamental quantitative principles of ecology in an accessible yet rigorous way, introducing students to the most basic of all ecological subjects, the structure and dynamics of populations. John Vandermeer and Deborah Goldberg show that populations are more than simply collections of individuals. Complex variables such as distribution and territory for expanding groups come into play when mathematical models are applied. Vandermeer and Goldberg build these models from the ground up, from first principles, using a broad range of empirical examples, from animals and viruses to plants and humans. They address a host of exciting topics along the way, including age-structured populations, spatially distributed populations, and metapopulations. This second edition of Population Ecology is fully updated and expanded, with additional exercises in virtually every chapter, making it the most up-to-date and comprehensive textbook of its kind. Provides an accessible mathematical foundation for the latest advances in ecology Features numerous exercises and examples throughout Introduces students to the key literature in the field The essential textbook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students An online illustration package is available to professors

Most prairies exist today as fragmented landscapes, making thoughtful and vigilant management ever more important. Intended for landowners and managers dedicated to understanding and nurturing their prairies as well as farmers, ranchers, conservationists, and all those with a strong interest in grasslands, ecologist Chris Helzer’s readable and practical manual educates prairie owners and managers about grassland ecology and gives them guidelines for keeping prairies diverse, vigorous, and viable. Chapters in the first section, "Prairie Ecology," describe prairie plants and the communities they live in, the ways in which disturbance modifies plant communities, the animal and plant inhabitants that are key to prairie survival, and the importance of diversity within plant and animal communities. Chapters in the second section, "Prairie Management," explore the adaptive management process as well as guiding principles for designing management strategies, examples of successful management systems such as fire and grazing, guidance for dealing with birds and other species that have particular habitat requirements and with the invasive species that have become the most serious threat that prairie managers have to deal with, and general techniques for prairie restoration. Following the conclusion and a forward-thinking note on climate change, eight appendixes provide more information on grazing, prescribed fire, and invasive species as well as bibliographic notes, references, and national and state organizations with expertise in prairie management. Grasslands can be found throughout much of North America, and the ideas and strategies in this book apply to most of them, particularly tallgrass and mixed-grass prairies in eastern North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, eastern Nebraska, eastern Kansas, eastern Oklahoma, northwestern Missouri, northern Illinois, northwestern Indiana, Iowa, southwestern Wisconsin, and southwestern Minnesota. By presenting all the factors that promote biological diversity and thus enhance prairie communities, then incorporating these factors into a set of clear-sighted management practices, The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States presents the tools necessary to ensure that grasslands are managed in the purposeful ways essential to the continued health and survival of prairie communities.

Millions of creatures live in the backyard: beetles and bugs; butterflies and birds; turtles and toads; ants, earthworms, and tiny animals hidden in the grass or deep in the soil. These creatures lead busy lives, climbing trees, crawling over rocks, searching for food, and building nests. With this book's 46 pages of illustrations — each accompanied by fact-filled captions — kids can combine the fun of coloring with the fascination of discovering how all kinds of living creatures are linked together. Realistic pictures to color depict the backyard through all four seasons and during the day and night. The captions identify different types of trees, flowers, and bushes; butterflies, moths, and birds; reptiles and amphibians; and many other plants and animals. Suitable for ages 8-11, this informative coloring book recaptures the excitement of the natural world that's right outside the back door.

"Society for Ecological Restoration"--Cover.

Fire, both inevitable and ubiquitous, plays a crucial role in North American ecosystems. But as necessary as fire is to maintaining healthy ecosystems, it threatens human lives and livelihoods in unacceptable ways. This volume explores the rich yet largely uncharted terrain at the intersection of fire policy, fire science, and fire management in order to find better ways of addressing this pressing dilemma. Written in clear language, it will help scientists, policy makers, and the general public, especially residents of fire-prone areas, better understand where we are today in regard to coping with wildfires, how we got here, and where we need to go. Drawing on abundant historical and analytic information to shed new light on current controversies, Living with Fire offers a dynamic new paradigm for coping with fire that recognizes its critical environmental role. The book also tells how we can rebuild the important ecological and political processes that are necessary for finding better ways to cope with fire and with other complex policy dilemmas.

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.