Complexity in Landscape Ecology

✍ Scribed by David G. Green, Nicholas Klomp, Glyn Rimmington, Suzanne Sadedin (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 216
• Series: Landscape Series 4
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Interactions matter. To understand the distributions of plants and animals in a landscape you need to understand how they interact with each other, and with their environment. The resulting networks of interactions make ecosystems highly complex. Recent research on complexity and artificial life provides many new insights about patterns and processes in landscapes and ecosystems. This book provides the first overview of that work for general readers. It covers such topics as connectivity, criticality, feedback, and networks, as well as their impact on the stability and predictability of ecosystem dynamics. With over 60 years of research experience of both ecology and complexity, the authors are uniquely qualified to provide a new perspective on traditional ecology. They argue that understanding ecological complexity is crucial in today’s globalized and interconnected world. Successful management of the world's ecosystems needs to combine models of ecosystem complexity with biodiversity, environmental, geographic and socioeconomic information.

✦ Table of Contents

COMPLEXITY AND ECOLOGY....Pages 1-14
SEEING THE WOOD FOR THE TREES....Pages 15-32
COMPLEXITY IN LANDSCAPES....Pages 33-50
OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB.....Pages 51-66
THE IMBALANCE OF NATURE....Pages 67-84
POPULATIONS IN LANDSCAPES....Pages 85-98
LIVING WITH THE NEIGHBOURS....Pages 99-114
GENETICS AND ADAPTATION IN LANDSCAPES....Pages 115-132
VIRTUAL WORLDS....Pages 133-150
DIGITAL ECOLOGY....Pages 151-168
THE GLOBAL PICTURE....Pages 169-202

✦ Subjects

Landscape Ecology; Ecology; Theoretical Ecology/Statistics; Complexity; Environmental Monitoring/Analysis