Small Scale Spatial And Temporal Patterns In Particles Plankton And Other Organisms

The planning for the conference held at Erice, Sicily, in November 1977, began with discussions among oceanographers from several countries on the need to consider the special problems and the recent results in the study of plankton "patchiness. " An approach to the Marine Sciences Panel of the NATO Science Committee resulted in a planning grant to determine the probable content and participation in such a meeting. The planning group consisted of B. Battaglia (Padua), G. E. B. Kullenberg (Copenhagen), A. Okubo (New York), T. Platt (Halifax, Nova Scotia) and J. H. Steele (Aberdeen). The group met in Aberdeen, Scotland, in September 1976. The proposal for a NATO School on the subject of "Spatial Pattern in Plankton Communities" was accepted by the Marine Science Panel and it was agreed that it be held at the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture in Erice. The Centre began in 1963 with an International School of Subnuclear Physics and has since developed to include courses in many other subjects which cover various fields of basic and applied research. The original aim of the . Centre was to create, in Italy, a cultural forum of high scientific standard which would allow young research workers to appreciate problems currently of major interest in various fields of research.

Freshwater Biodiversity is a much underestimated component of global biodiversity, both in its diversity and in its potential to act as models for fundamental research in evolutionary biology and ecosystem studies. Freshwater organisms also reflect quality of water bodies and can thus be used to monitor changes in ecosystem health. The present book comprises a unique collection of primary research papers spanning a wide range of topics in aquatic biodiversity studies, and including a first global assessment of specific diversity of freshwater animals. The book also presents a section on the interaction between scientists and science policy managers. A target opinion paper lists priorities in aquatic biodiversity research for the next decade and several reactions from distinguished scientists discuss the relevance of these items from different points of view: fundamental ecology, taxonomy and systematics, needs of developing countries, present-day biodiversity policy at European and at global scales. It is believed that such a platform for the interaction between science and science policy is an absolute necessity for the efficient use of research budgets in the future.

The three main missions of any organism--growing, reproducing, and surviving--depend on encounters with food and mates, and on avoiding encounters with predators. Through natural selection, the behavior and ecology of plankton organisms have evolved to optimize these tasks. This book offers a mechanistic approach to the study of ocean ecology by exploring biological interactions in plankton at the individual level. The book focuses on encounter mechanisms, since the pace of life in the ocean intimately relates to the rate at which encounters happen. Thomas Kiørboe examines the life and interactions of plankton organisms with the larger aim of understanding marine pelagic food webs. He looks at plankton ecology and behavior in the context of the organisms' immediate physical and chemical habitats. He shows that the nutrient uptake, feeding rates, motility patterns, signal transmissions, and perception of plankton are all constrained by nonintuitive interactions between organism biology and small-scale physical and chemical characteristics of the three-dimensional fluid environment. Most of the book's chapters consist of a theoretical introduction followed by examples of how the theory might be applied to real-world problems. In the final chapters, mechanistic insights of individual-level processes help to describe broader population dynamics and pelagic food web structure and function.

Zooplankton organisms comprise very important elements of the structure and function of marine and freshwater ecosystems, not only as consumers of primary production, but also as food items for juvenile stages of several fish species. Moreover, its sensitivity to both man-made and natural changes makes zooplankton quite suitable for assessing alterations in the trophic dynamics and the ecological state of aquatic ecosystems related to changes in nutrient loading and climate. Multi-scale, spatial and temporal relationships between zooplankton variability and environmental heterogeneity are still not satisfactorily understood due to the complexity of the different aquatic ecosystems (considering both biotic and abiotic elements). Thus, the ambition of the present edition is to contribute to the understanding of the role of zooplankton by investigating ecological aspects such as the species diversity, their spatial distribution and seasonal dynamics in relation to the environmental influence in various aquatic ecosystems around the world. Topics discussed in this book include the understanding of the role of zooplankton in the transfer of pollutants through trophic food webs; plankton models to explain red tides; spatial patterns of trophy and zooplankton communities in a tropical urban reservoir; the zooplankton variation in five Greek lakes; the zooplankton community in a nuclear power station cooling reservoir; the spatio-temporal dynamics of cladocera and copepoda in the Danube River; the gelatinous zooplankton in the Namibian upwelling region; and the zooplankton community in relation to the environmental factors in a solar saltern.

The two-volume set of LNCS 10941 and 10942 constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Advances in Swarm Intelligence, ICSI 2018, held in Shanghai, China, in June 2018. The total of 113 papers presented in these volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 197 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections as follows: theories and models of swarm intelligence; ant colony optimization; particle swarm optimization; artificial bee colony algorithms; genetic algorithms; differential evolution; fireworks algorithms; bacterial foraging optimization; artificial immune system; hydrologic cycle optimization; other swarm-based optimization algorithms; hybrid optimization algorithms; multi-objective optimization; large-scale global optimization; multi-agent systems; swarm robotics; fuzzy logic approaches; planning and routing problems; recommendation in social media; prediction, classification; finding patterns; image enhancement; deep learning.

This special volume of Advances in Marine Biology covers in detail the biology of calanoid copepods. Copepods are probably the most numerous multicellular organisms on earth. They are aquatic animals that live in both marine and fresh water, and are of prime importance in marine ecosystems as they form a direct link between phytoplankton and fish. This volume is essential for all marine biologists. Advances in Marine Biology contains up-to-date reviews of all areas of marine science, including fisheries science and macro/micro fauna. Each volume contains peer-reviewed papers detailing the ecology of marine regions.