Population Dynamics In Ecological Space And Time

As profound threats to ecosystems increase worldwide, ecologists must move beyond studying single communities at a single point in time. All of the dynamic, interconnected spatial and temporal processes that determine the distribution and abundance of species must be understood in order to develop new conservation and management strategies. This volume is the first to integrate mathematical and biological approaches to these crucial topics. The editors include not only a wide variety of theoretical approaches, but also a broad range of experimental and field studies, with chapters written by renowned experts in community ecology, ecological modeling, population genetics, and conservation biology. In addition to providing new insights into well-known topics such as migration, the authors also introduce some less familiar subjects, including bacterial population genetics and ecotoxicology. For anyone interested in the study, management, and conservation of populations, this book will prove to be a valuable resource.

This volume develops a unifying approach to population studies, emphasising the interplay between modelling and experimentation. Throughout, mathematicians and biologists are provided with a framework within which population dynamics can be fully explored and understood. Aspects of population dynamics covered include birth-death and logistic processes, competition and predator-prey relationships, chaos, reaction time-delays, fluctuating environments, spatial systems, velocities of spread, epidemics, and spatial branching structures. Both deterministic and stochastic models are considered. Whilst the more theoretically orientated sections will appeal to mathematical biologists, the material is presented so that readers with little mathematical expertise can bypass these without losing the main flow of the text.

Spatial Ecology addresses the fundamental effects of space on the dynamics of individual species and on the structure, dynamics, diversity, and stability of multispecies communities. Although the ecological world is unavoidably spatial, there have been few attempts to determine how explicit considerations of space may alter the predictions of ecological models, or what insights it may give into the causes of broad-scale ecological patterns. As this book demonstrates, the spatial structure of a habitat can fundamentally alter both the qualitative and quantitative dynamics and outcomes of ecological processes. Spatial Ecology highlights the importance of space to five topical areas: stability, patterns of diversity, invasions, coexistence, and pattern generation. It illustrates both the diversity of approaches used to study spatial ecology and the underlying similarities of these approaches. Over twenty contributors address issues ranging from the persistence of endangered species, to the maintenance of biodiversity, to the dynamics of hosts and their parasitoids, to disease dynamics, multispecies competition, population genetics, and fundamental processes relevant to all these cases. There have been many recent advances in our understanding of the influence of spatially explicit processes on individual species and on multispecies communities. This book synthesizes these advances, shows the limitations of traditional, non-spatial approaches, and offers a variety of new approaches to spatial ecology that should stimulate ecological research.

This book gives a unifying framework for estimating the abundance of open populations: populations subject to births, deaths and movement, given imperfect measurements or samples of the populations. The focus is primarily on populations of vertebrates for which dynamics are typically modelled within the framework of an annual cycle, and for which stochastic variability in the demographic processes is usually modest. Discrete-time models are developed in which animals can be assigned to discrete states such as age class, gender, maturity, population (within a metapopulation), or species (for multi-species models). The book goes well beyond estimation of abundance, allowing inference on underlying population processes such as birth or recruitment, survival and movement. This requires the formulation and fitting of population dynamics models. The resulting fitted models yield both estimates of abundance and estimates of parameters characterizing the underlying processes.

This book outlines concepts such as population variability, population stability, population viability and persistance, and harvest yield. Also addressed are specific applications to conservation such as managing species at risk, fishery management, and the spatial manageement of marine resources.--Adapted from back cover.

Spatial Ecology addresses the fundamental effects of space on the dynamics of individual species and on the structure, dynamics, diversity, and stability of multispecies communities. Although the ecological world is unavoidably spatial, there have been few attempts to determine how explicit considerations of space may alter the predictions of ecological models, or what insights it may give into the causes of broad-scale ecological patterns. As this book demonstrates, the spatial structure of a habitat can fundamentally alter both the qualitative and quantitative dynamics and outcomes of ecological processes. Spatial Ecology highlights the importance of space to five topical areas: stability, patterns of diversity, invasions, coexistence, and pattern generation. It illustrates both the diversity of approaches used to study spatial ecology and the underlying similarities of these approaches. Over twenty contributors address issues ranging from the persistence of endangered species, to the maintenance of biodiversity, to the dynamics of hosts and their parasitoids, to disease dynamics, multispecies competition, population genetics, and fundamental processes relevant to all these cases. There have been many recent advances in our understanding of the influence of spatially explicit processes on individual species and on multispecies communities. This book synthesizes these advances, shows the limitations of traditional, non-spatial approaches, and offers a variety of new approaches to spatial ecology that should stimulate ecological research.

The theme of the book is the distribution and abundance of organisms in space and time. The core of the book lies in how local births and deaths are tied to emigration and immigration processes, and how environmental variability at different scales affects population dynamics with stochastic processes and spatial structure and shows how elementary analytical tools can be used to understand population fluctuations, synchrony, processes underlying range distributions and community structure and species coexistence. The book also shows how spatial population dynamics models can be used to understand life history evolution and aspects of evolutionary game theory. Although primarily based on analytical and numerical analyses of spatial population processes, data from several study systems are also dealt with.

A synthesis of contemporary analytical and modeling approaches in population ecology The book provides an overview of the key analytical approaches that are currently used in demographic, genetic, and spatial analyses in population ecology. The chapters present current problems, introduce advances in analytical methods and models, and demonstrate the applications of quantitative methods to ecological data. The book covers new tools for designing robust field studies; estimation of abundance and demographic rates; matrix population models and analyses of population dynamics; and current approaches for genetic and spatial analysis. Each chapter is illustrated by empirical examples based on real datasets, with a companion website that offers online exercises and examples of computer code in the R statistical software platform. Fills a niche for a book that emphasizes applied aspects of population analysis Covers many of the current methods being used to analyse population dynamics and structure Illustrates the application of specific analytical methods through worked examples based on real datasets Offers readers the opportunity to work through examples or adapt the routines to their own datasets using computer code in the R statistical platform Population Ecology in Practice is an excellent book for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in population ecology or ecological statistics, as well as established researchers needing a desktop reference for contemporary methods used to develop robust population assessments.