Ecology

From scorching, barren deserts to humid tropical forests, from deep in the soil, to high in the tree canopies, ants are everywhere! Comprising a substantial part of living biomass on earth, ants are integral to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. More than 12,000 species have been described to date, and it is estimated that perhaps as many still await classification. Their social structure provides a rich ground for exploring how division of labour affects the acquisition of resources, foraging and defensive behaviours, and coevolution with the flora and fauna with which they interact. The study of ants has led to significant advances in our understanding of insect evolution, global diversity patterns, competitive interactions, mutualisms, ecosystem's responses to change, and biological invasions. Ant Ecology explores these and other key ecological issues and new developments in myrmecology across a range of scales. The book begins with a global perspective on species diversity in time and space and explores interactions at the community level before describing the population ecology of these social insects. The final section covers the recent ecological phenomenon of invasive ants: how they move across the globe, invade, affect ecosystems, and are managed by humans. Each chapter links ant ecology to broader ecological principles, provides a succinct summary, and discusses future research directions. The Synthesis and Perspectives highlights contributions of ant ecology to ecology more broadly, and outlines promising areas for future research.

How will biodiversity loss affect ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, and human wellbeing? In an age of accelerating biodiversity loss, this volume summarizes recent advances in biodiversity‐ecosystem functioning research and explores the economics of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The first section summarizes the development of the basic science and provides a meta-analysis that quantitatively tests several biodiversity and ecosystem functioning hypotheses. The second section describes the natural science foundations of biodiversity‐ecosystem functioning research, including: quantifying functional diversity, the development of the field into a predictive science, effects of stability and complexity, methods to quantify mechanisms by which diversity affects functioning, the importance of trophic structure, microbial ecology, and spatial dynamics. The third section takes research on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning further than it has ever gone into the human dimension. The first six chapters cover the most pressing environmental challenges humanity faces, including effects of diversity on: climate change mitigation, restoration of degraded habitats, managed ecosystems, pollination, disease, and biological invasions. The remaining chapters of section three that consider the economic perspective, including: a synthesis of the economics of ecosystem services and biodiversity, and the options open to policy-makers to address the failure of markets to account for the loss of ecosystem services; an examination of the challenges of valuing ecosystem services and, hence, to understanding the human consequences of decisions that neglect these services; and an examination of the ways in which economists are currently incorporating biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research into decision models for the conservation and management of biodiversity. The final section describes new advances in ecoinformatics that will help transform this field into a globally predictive science, and finally, summarizes the advancements and future directions of the field. The book's ultimate conclusion is that biodiversity is an essential element of any strategy for sustainable development.

Bioinvasions and Globalization synthesises our current knowledge of the ecology and economics of biological invasions, providing an in-depth evaluation of the science and its implications for managing the causes and consequences of one of the most pressing environmental issues facing humanity today. Emergent zoonotic diseases such as HIV and SARS have already imposed major costs in terms of human health, whilst plant and animal pathogens have had similar effects on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. The introduction of pests, predators, and competitors into many ecosystems has disrupted the benefits they provide to people, in many cases leading to the extirpation or even extinction of native species. This book analyzes the main drivers of bioinvasions — the growth of world trade, global transport and travel, habitat conversion and land-use intensification, and climate change — and their consequences for ecosystem functioning. It shows how bioinvasions impose disproportionately high costs on countries where a large proportion of people depend heavily on the exploitation of natural resources. It considers the options for improving assessment and management of invasive species risks, and especially for achieving the international cooperation needed to address bioinvasions as a negative externality of international trade.

Savannahs are one of the largest biomes of the world, comprising about 20% of the land surface. Stated simply, they are tropical and subtropical grasslands, with scattered bushes and trees. Most savannah occurs in Africa, with a smaller amount in South America, India, and Australia. This book looks at: (1) the climate factors that determine the distribution of savannahs worldwide and briefly looks at savannahs in South America, Australia, India, and Africa; (2) the major plants (grasses, and trees such as Acacia) and large animals (mainly large mammals) that live in African savannahs; and (3) the biological and ecological factors that influence their population size, interactions (such as predation), and community composition. Conservation issues such as tourism, hunting, and the conflict between wildlife and farmers are discussed.

This book offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to desert ecology, and adopts a strong evolutionary focus. As with other titles in the Biology of Habitats Series, the emphasis in the book is on the organisms that dominate this harsh environment, although conservation and experimental aspects are also considered. Deserts are defined by their arid conditions; a consequence of this aridity is that most of the area occupied by desert is barren and monotonous, leading many people to regard it as wasteland. However, deserts are widespread and represent surprisingly biodiverse environments, although it is the relative simplicity of these ecosystems that makes them more tractable for study than more complex environments. In these resource-poor locations, natural selection is working at its greatest extreme, and provides some of the best-known examples of Darwinian selection. The Biology of Deserts includes a wide range of ecological and evolutionary issues, including morphological and physiological adaptations of desert plants and animals, species interactions, the importance of predation and parasitism, food webs, biodiversity, and conservation. It features a balance of plant and animal (both invertebrate and vertebrate) examples, and also emphasizes topical applied issues such as desertification and invasive species. The book concludes by considering the positive aspects of desert conservation.

Peatlands form intriguing landscape elements in large parts of the world and play important roles for biodiversity and for the atmospheric carbon balance. The Biology of Peatlands begins with an overview of the main peatland types (marsh, swamp, fen, and bog), which provides the basis for a deeper understanding of the diversity of the entire range of biota present (microbes, invertebrates, plants, and vertebrates), together with their specific adaptations to peatland habitats. Detailed coverage is devoted to the moss genus Sphagnum, the most important functional plant group in northern peatlands. Throughout the book, the interactions between organisms and environmental conditions (especially wetness, availability of oxygen, and pH) are stressed, and key factors and processes including hydrology, nutrient cycling, light, and temperature are dealt with. Peatlands are archives of past vegetation and climate, and the authors describe the intriguing patterns and landforms characteristic of peatlands in different parts of the world, together with theories on how they have developed over centuries and millennia. The role of peatlands as sources or sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane, and their influence on climatic change, are also outlined. A final chapter considers peatland management, conservation, and restoration. The text is suitable for students and researchers of peatlands as well as the professional ecologists and conservation biologists.

There is now an increased awareness of the importance of polar regions in the Earth system, as well as their vulnerability to anthropogenic derived change, including of course global climate change. This text is the latest edition of this book and offers an introduction to polar ecology. It has been revised and updated, providing expanded coverage of marine ecosystems and the impact of humans. It incorporates a comparison of the Arctic and Antarctic systems, with a particular emphasis on the effects of climate change, and describes marine, freshwater, glacial, and terrestrial habitats. Much emphasis is placed on the organisms that dominate these extreme environments although pollution, conservation, and experimental aspects are also considered.

This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date synthesis of what is known about soil biodiversity and the factors that regulate its distribution, as well as the functional significance of below-ground biodiversity for ecosystem form and function. It describes the vast diversity of biota that live in the soil environment — the most complex habitat on Earth — and discusses the factors that act as determinants of this diversity across different spatial and temporal scales. This book also considers how biotic interactions in soil influence the important soil processes of decomposition and nutrient cycling. It demonstrates how interactions and feedbacks between diverse plant and soil communities act as important drivers of ecosystem form and function. The importance of these relationships for understanding how ecosystems respond to global change phenomena, including climate change, is discussed in depth. Much is still to be learned about the soil biota and their roles in ecosystems, and the author highlights some of the many challenges that face ecologists in the exploration of soil. This book provides an introduction to the biology of soil, and also discusses the most recent developments in this progressive field of ecology. The importance of soil biotic interactions for community and ecosystem ecology is illustrated through the use of numerous examples and case studies.

Over the past two decades, an enormous effort has been mounted by numerous federal and state agencies to prepare America to defend against the possibility of a catastrophic bioterrorist attack. This effort jumped ahead at warp speed following the horrendous World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September, 2001, followed by the postal anthrax scares a few weeks later that killed five people. By the end of 2008, the US will have spent nearly fifty billion dollars upgrading almost every conceivable aspect of our ability to respond defensively to a bioterrorism attack. How likely is it that America will experience a future bioterrorist attack that could bring this country to its knees? What would it take to mount such an attack? Who could do it, and what weapons would they use? How would bioterrorism compare with the damage America would suffer from other forms of terrorism, or from a natural biocatastrophe like avian influenza? No nation has infinite resources, and we must accept that we may never be able to make ourselves completely safe from every threat we face. We will have to make rational assessments of those threats we can identify, and apportion our resources as intelligently as we can to deal with them. This book looks at the scientific, political, legal and social facets of bioterrorism that can guide us as we attempt to bring this particular threat into a realistic perspective for the 21st century.

Community ecology is the study of the interactions between populations of coexisting species. This book provides a state of the art in theory, models and applications of community ecology, with special attention to its topology, dynamics, the importance of spatial and temporal scale as well as applications to emerging problems in human-dominated ecosystems (including the restoration and reconstruction of viable communities). It adopts a mainly theoretical approach and focuses on the use of network-based theories and models which are little explored in standard community ecology textbooks. The book includes discussion of the effects of biotic invasions on natural communities, the linking of ecological network structure to empirically measured community approaches, the effects of evolution on community patterns and processes, and the integration of fundamental interactions into ecological networks. A final chapter indicates future research directions for the discipline. As such, this book provides ideal graduate seminar course material. Community Ecology will be suitable for graduate-level students as well as professional researchers in the fields of population and community ecology, network biology and theoretical ecology.