Scaling in Ecology with a Model System

Scaling in Ecology with a Model System PDF Author: Aaron M. Ellison
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691172706
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
"Scale - the understanding of ecological phenomena through levels of biological organization across time and space - is one of most important concepts in ecology. It is often challenging for ecologists to find systems that lend themselves to study across scales; however, Sarracenia, a pitcher plant indigenous to the eastern United States, is unique because it can be studied at a hierarchy of scales: individuals, communities, and whole ecosystems. Ecologists Aaron Ellison and Nicolas Gotelli have studied Sarracenia for decades and, in this book, they synthesize their research and show how this system can inform the broad and challenging question of scaling in ecology. The authors' goal is to deepen the current understanding of major ecological processes, and how they operate across scales"--

Scaling in Ecology with a Model System

Scaling in Ecology with a Model System PDF Author: Aaron M. Ellison
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691172706
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
"Scale - the understanding of ecological phenomena through levels of biological organization across time and space - is one of most important concepts in ecology. It is often challenging for ecologists to find systems that lend themselves to study across scales; however, Sarracenia, a pitcher plant indigenous to the eastern United States, is unique because it can be studied at a hierarchy of scales: individuals, communities, and whole ecosystems. Ecologists Aaron Ellison and Nicolas Gotelli have studied Sarracenia for decades and, in this book, they synthesize their research and show how this system can inform the broad and challenging question of scaling in ecology. The authors' goal is to deepen the current understanding of major ecological processes, and how they operate across scales"--

Scaling in Ecology with a Model System

Scaling in Ecology with a Model System PDF Author: Aaron Ellison
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691222789
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
A groundbreaking approach to scale and scaling in ecological theory and practice Scale is one of the most important concepts in ecology, yet researchers often find it difficult to find ecological systems that lend themselves to its study. Scaling in Ecology with a Model System synthesizes nearly three decades of research on the ecology of Sarracenia purpurea—the northern pitcher plant—showing how this carnivorous plant and its associated food web of microbes and macrobes can inform the challenging question of scaling in ecology. Drawing on a wealth of findings from their pioneering lab and field experiments, Aaron Ellison and Nicholas Gotelli reveal how the Sarracenia microecosystem has emerged as a model system for experimental ecology. Ellison and Gotelli examine Sarracenia at a hierarchy of spatial scales—individual pitchers within plants, plants within bogs, and bogs within landscapes—and demonstrate how pitcher plants can serve as replicate miniature ecosystems that can be studied in wetlands throughout the United States and Canada. They show how research on the Sarracenia microecosystem proceeds much more rapidly than studies of larger, more slowly changing ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, lakes, or streams, which are more difficult to replicate and experimentally manipulate. Scaling in Ecology with a Model System offers new insights into ecophysiology and stoichiometry, demography, extinction risk and species distribution models, food webs and trophic dynamics, and tipping points and regime shifts.

Scaling Physiological Processes

Scaling Physiological Processes PDF Author:
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0323139574
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Traditional plant physiological ecology is organism centered and provides a useful framework for understanding the interactions between plants and their environment and for identifying characteristics likely to result in plant success in a particular habitat. This book focuses on extending concepts from plant physiological ecology as a basis for understanding carbon, energy, and biogeochemical cycles at ecosystem, regional, and global levels. This will be a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in ecology, plant ecophysiology, ecosystem research, biometerology, earth system science, and remote sensing. Key Features * The integration of metabolic activities across spatial scales, from leaf to ecosystem * Global constraints and regional processes * Functional units in ecological scaling * Models and technologies for scaling

Ecological Scale

Ecological Scale PDF Author: David Lawrence Peterson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231105033
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 638

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Book Description
Ecological Scale provides invaluable perspectives on the application of the concepts of measurement, analysis, and inference in both theoretical and applied ecology, ultimately providing a broad-based understanding for resource managers and other ecological professionals.

Individual-based Modeling and Ecology

Individual-based Modeling and Ecology PDF Author: Volker Grimm
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400850622
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Individual-based models are an exciting and widely used new tool for ecology. These computational models allow scientists to explore the mechanisms through which population and ecosystem ecology arises from how individuals interact with each other and their environment. This book provides the first in-depth treatment of individual-based modeling and its use to develop theoretical understanding of how ecological systems work, an approach the authors call "individual-based ecology.? Grimm and Railsback start with a general primer on modeling: how to design models that are as simple as possible while still allowing specific problems to be solved, and how to move efficiently through a cycle of pattern-oriented model design, implementation, and analysis. Next, they address the problems of theory and conceptual framework for individual-based ecology: What is "theory"? That is, how do we develop reusable models of how system dynamics arise from characteristics of individuals? What conceptual framework do we use when the classical differential equation framework no longer applies? An extensive review illustrates the ecological problems that have been addressed with individual-based models. The authors then identify how the mechanics of building and using individual-based models differ from those of traditional science, and provide guidance on formulating, programming, and analyzing models. This book will be helpful to ecologists interested in modeling, and to other scientists interested in agent-based modeling.

Spatial Ecology

Spatial Ecology PDF Author: David Tilman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069118836X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
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.

Scaling in Biology

Scaling in Biology PDF Author: James H. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195131428
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Scaling relationships have been a persistent theme in biology at least since the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo. While there have been many excellent empirical and theoretical investigations, there has been little attempt to synthesize this diverse but interrelated area of biology. In an effort to fill this void, Scaling in Biology, the first general treatment of scaling in biology in over 15 years, covers a broad spectrum of the most relevant topics in a series of chapters written by experts in the field. Some of those topics discussed include allometry and fractal structure, branching of vascular systems of mammals and plants, biomechanical and life history of plants, invertebrates and vertebrates, and species-area patterns of biological diversity.

Ecological Heterogeneity

Ecological Heterogeneity PDF Author: Jurek Kolasa
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9781461277811
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
An attractive, promising, and frustrating feature of ecology is its complex ity, both conceptual and observational. Increasing acknowledgment of the importance of scale testifies to the shifting focus in large areas of ecology. In the rush to explore problems of scale, another general aspect of ecolog ical systems has been given less attention. This aspect, equally important, is heterogeneity. Its importance lies in the ubiquity of heterogeneity as a feature of ecological systems and in the number of questions it raises questions to which answers are not readily available. What is heterogeneity? Does it differ from complexity? What dimensions need be considered to evaluate heterogeneity ade quately? Can heterogeneity be measured at various scales? Is heterogeneity apart of organization of ecological systems? How does it change in time and space? What are the causes of heterogeneity and causes of its change? This volume attempts to answer these questions. It is devoted to iden tification of the meaning, range of applications, problems, and methodol ogy associated with the study of heterogeneity. The coverage is thus broad and rich, and the contributing authors have been encouraged to range widely in discussions and reflections. vi Preface The chapters are grouped into themes. The first group focuses on the conceptual foundations (Chapters 1-5). These papers exarnine the meaning of the term, historical developments, and relations to scale. The second theme is modeling population and interspecific interactions in hetero geneous environments (Chapters 6 and 7).

Ecological Models and Data in R

Ecological Models and Data in R PDF Author: Benjamin M. Bolker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691125228
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Introduction and background; Exploratory data analysis and graphics; Deterministic functions for ecological modeling; Probability and stochastic distributions for ecological modeling; Stochatsic simulation and power analysis; Likelihood and all that; Optimization and all that; Likelihood examples; Standar statistics revisited; Modeling variance; Dynamic models.

The Theory of Ecological Communities (MPB-57)

The Theory of Ecological Communities (MPB-57) PDF Author: Mark Vellend
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691208999
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological communities? What other scientific areas might serve as a guiding framework? As it turns out, the core focus of community ecology—understanding patterns of diversity and composition of biological variants across space and time—is shared by evolutionary biology and its very coherent conceptual framework, population genetics theory. The Theory of Ecological Communities takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole. Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching processes: selection among species, drift, dispersal, and speciation. These are analogues of the four central processes in population genetics theory—selection within species, drift, gene flow, and mutation—and together they subsume almost all of the many dozens of more specific models built to describe the dynamics of communities of interacting species. The result is a theory that allows the effects of many low-level processes, such as competition, facilitation, predation, disturbance, stress, succession, colonization, and local extinction to be understood as the underpinnings of high-level processes with widely applicable consequences for ecological communities. Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, The Theory of Ecological Communities provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.