General Ecology

This book is written to meet the need for a concise textbook of ecology, and it is addressed to university students without special biological knowledge. The book describes the basic features of the modern ecology. Examples of topics are: energy flows in food chains and ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles, population growth and regulation, species diversity and ecological succession.

Ecology is more quantitative and theory-driven than ever before, and A Primer of Ecology with R combines an introduction to the major theoretical concepts in general ecology with a cutting edge open source tool, the R programming language. Starting with geometric growth and proceeding through stability of multispecies interactions and species-abundance distributions, this book demystifies and explains fundamental ideas in population and community ecology. Graduate students in ecology, along with upper division undergraduates and faculty, will find this to be a useful overview of important topics.

Freshwater and Marine Ecology is an introduction to the field of aquatic ecology, integrating the conceptually and methodologically widely overlapping fields of limnology and biological oceanography. It is structured like most textbooks of general ecology, leading from more elemental entities (individuals having to cope with their environment) to increasingly overarching entities, from populations over communities and ecosystems to the biogeochemistry of the entire planet and, finally, an overview over the major human impacts on the aquatic components of the earth system. The book provides examples for all major theoretical concepts of general ecology while the usual ecology textbooks have a strong terrestrial bias and rely only on few aquatic examples. This book takes the contrasting approach, motivated by the fact the fact that life originated from aquatic systems and that surface waters cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface. The choice of studies used as examples in Freshwater and Marine Ecology provides a balanced mix of freshwater and marine studies, of field observations, experimental and modeling studies. The readers are confronted with very recent work leading to the forefront of contemporaneous research but also with classic studies which laid the foundations of theory development in the field. Freshwater and Marine Ecology is a comprehensive text ideally serving for undergraduate courses in biological oceanography, limnology, and ecology, but also for advanced students, teachers and scientists who had limited exposure to aquatic sciences and/or ecology during their studies.

This extensively revised new edition of Wildlife Ecology, Conservation, and Management provides a succinct and clear introduction to general ecological principles, and then goes on to show how those principles can be applied to wildlife management and conservation.

Marine sediments provide the largest habitat on planet earth, yet knowledge of the structure and function of their flora and fauna continues to be poorly described in current textbooks. This concise, readable introduction to benthic ecology builds upon the strengths of the previous edition but has been thoroughly revised throughout to incorporate the new technologies and methods that have allowed a rapid and ongoing development of the field.