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.

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.

Dr. Timothy Schowalter has succeeded in creating a unique, updated treatment of insect ecology. This revised and expanded text looks at how insects adapt to environmental conditions while maintaining the ability to substantially alter their environment. It covers a range of topics- from individual insects that respond to local changes in the environment and affect resource distribution, to entire insect communities that have the capacity to modify ecosystem conditions.Insect Ecology, Second Edition, synthesizes the latest research in the field and has been produced in full color throughout. It is ideal for students in both entomology and ecology-focused programs. NEW TO THIS EDITION:* New topics such as elemental defense by plants, chaotic models, molecular methods to measure disperson, food web relationships, and more* Expanded sections on plant defenses, insect learning, evolutionary tradeoffs, conservation biology and more* Includes more than 350 new references* More than 40 new full-color figures

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.

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.

The essential introduction to population ecology—now expanded and fully updated 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

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.

Chaos in Real Data studies the range of data analytic techniques available to study nonlinear population dynamics for ecological time series. Several case studies are studied using typically short and noisy population data from field and laboratory. A range of modern approaches, such as response surface methodology and mechanistic mathematical modelling, are applied to several case studies. Experts honestly appraise how well these methods have performed on their data. The accessible style of the book ensures its readability for non-quantitative biologists. The data remain available, as benchmarks for future study, on the worldwide web.