Quantitative Ecology

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.

This book focuses on how scientific methodologies can help industrial managers, entrepreneurs and policymakers handle the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in an efficient and realistic way. It also offers an operative scheme for scientists to overcome their discipline barriers. Is interdisciplinarity an intrinsic research value or is it merely instrumental for handling the increasing flux of open problems that sustainability poses to science?Can these problems of sustainability be solved with what the authors already know? Is it just a matter of having the right people at the table and giving them sufficient resources, or is it something more? Is meeting the needs of the present without compromising those of future generations a scientific definition of sustainable development? Questions similar to those posed in the sixties regarding complexity must be asked about sustainability today. In addition, the new data science includes powerful tools for making novel quantitative predictions about future sustainability indicators, an open problem that the book discusses. This book is primarily addressed to Ph.D. students, postdocs and senior researchers in the Life and Hard Science (LHS) and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) disciplines, as well as professionals of the primary, secondary and tertiary industrial sectors.