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Bayesian modeling has become an indispensable tool for ecological research because it is uniquely suited to deal with complexity in a statistically coherent way. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the latest Bayesian methods. It emphasizes the principles behind the computations, giving ecologists a big-picture understanding of how to implement this powerful statistical approach, and is an essential primer for non-statisticians. It begins with a definition of probability and develops a step-by-step sequence of connected ideas, including basic distribution theory, network diagrams, hierarchical models, Markov chain Monte Carlo, and inference from single and multiple models. The book places less emphasis on computer coding, favoring instead a concise presentation of the mathematical statistics needed to understand how and why Bayesian analysis works. It also explains how to write out properly formulated hierarchical Bayesian models and use them in computing, research papers, and proposals. This book enables ecologists to understand the statistical principles behind Bayesian modeling and apply them to research, teaching, policy, and management.

This textbook provides a unique and thorough look at the application of chemical biomarkers to aquatic ecosystems. Defining a chemical biomarker as a compound that can be linked to particular sources of organic matter identified in the sediment record, the book indicates that the application of these biomarkers for an understanding of aquatic ecosystems consists of a biogeochemical approach that has been quite successful but underused. This book offers a wide-ranging guide to the broad diversity of these chemical biomarkers, is the first to be structured around the compounds themselves, and examines them in a connected and comprehensive way. This book is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate students seeking training in this area; researchers in biochemistry, organic geochemistry, and biogeochemistry; researchers working on aspects of organic cycling in aquatic ecosystems; and paleoceanographers, petroleum geologists, and ecologists.

In recent years, scientists have realized that evolution can occur on timescales much shorter than the “long lapse of ages” emphasized by Darwin—in fact, evolutionary change is occurring all around us all the time. This book provides an authoritative and accessible introduction to eco-evolutionary dynamics, a cutting-edge new field that seeks to unify evolution and ecology into a common conceptual framework focusing on rapid and dynamic environmental and evolutionary change. The book covers key aspects of evolution, ecology, and their interactions. Topics range from natural selection, adaptive divergence, ecological speciation, and gene flow to population and community dynamics, ecosystem function, plasticity, and genomics. The book evaluates conceptual and methodological approaches, and draws on empirical data from natural populations—including those in human-disturbed environments—to tackle a number of classic and emerging research questions. It also discusses exciting new directions for future research at the intersection of ecology and evolution. The book reveals how evolution and ecology interact strongly on short timescales to shape the world we see around us.

This book provides a first synthetic view of an emerging area of ecology and biogeography, linking individual- and population-level processes to geographic distributions and biodiversity patterns. Problems in evolutionary ecology, macroecology, and biogeography are illuminated by this integrative view. The book focuses on correlative approaches known as ecological niche modeling, species distribution modeling, or habitat suitability modeling, which use associations between known occurrences of species and environmental variables to identify environmental conditions under which populations can be maintained. The spatial distribution of environments suitable for the species can then be estimated: a potential distribution for the species. This approach has broad applicability to ecology, evolution, biogeography, and conservation biology, as well as to understanding the geographic potential of invasive species and infectious diseases, and the biological implications of climate change. The book lays out conceptual foundations and general principles for understanding and interpreting species distributions with respect to geography and environment. Focus is on development of niche models. While serving as a guide for students and researchers, the book also provides a theoretical framework to support future progress in the field.

Rising temperatures are affecting organisms in all of Earth's biomes, but the complexity of ecological responses to climate change has hampered the development of a conceptually unified treatment of them. In a remarkably comprehensive synthesis, this book presents past, ongoing, and future ecological responses to climate change in the context of two simplifying hypotheses, facilitation and interference, arguing that biotic interactions may be the primary driver of ecological responses to climate change across all levels of biological organization. The author's synthesis and analyses of ecological consequences of climate change extend from the Late Pleistocene to the present, and through the next century of projected warming. The book's investigation is grounded in classic themes of enduring interest in ecology, but developed around novel conceptual and mathematical models of observed and predicted dynamics. Using stability theory as a recurring theme, the book argues that the magnitude of climatic variability may be just as important as the magnitude and direction of change in determining whether populations, communities, and species persist. It urges a more refined consideration of species interactions, emphasizing important distinctions between lateral and vertical interactions and their disparate roles in shaping responses of populations, communities, and ecosystems to climate change.

Human impacts are dramatically altering our natural ecosystems but the exact repercussions on ecological sustainability and function remain unclear. As a result, food web theory has experienced a proliferation of research seeking to address these critical areas. Arguing that the various recent and classical food web theories can be looked at collectively and in a highly consistent and testable way, this book synthesizes and reconciles modern and classical perspectives into a general unified theory. The book brings together outcomes from population-, community-, and ecosystem-level approaches under the common currency of energy or material fluxes. It shows that these approaches—often studied in isolation—all have the same general implications in terms of stability of the population dynamics. Specifically, increased fluxes of energy or material tend to destabilize populations, communities, and whole ecosystems. With this understanding, stabilizing structures at different levels of the ecological hierarchy can be identified and any population-, community-, or ecosystem-level structures that mute energy or material flow also stabilize systems dynamics. The book uses this powerful general framework to discuss the effects of human impact on ecological stability and sustainability, and it demonstrates that there is clear empirical evidence that the structures supporting ecological systems have been dangerously eroded. Uniting the latest research on food webs with classical theories, this book will be a standard source in the understanding of natural food web functions.

Meta-analysis is a powerful statistical methodology for synthesizing research evidence across independent studies. This is the first comprehensive handbook of meta-analysis written specifically for ecologists and evolutionary biologists, and it provides an invaluable introduction for beginners as well as an up-to-date guide for experienced meta-analysts. The chapters walk readers through every step of meta-analysis, from problem formulation to the presentation of the results. The book identifies both the advantages of using meta-analysis for research synthesis and the potential pitfalls and limitations of meta-analysis (including when it should not be used). Different approaches to carrying out a meta-analysis are described, and include moment and least-square, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian approaches, all illustrated using worked examples based on real biological datasets. The book is tailored to the biological sciences, and will provide an invaluable text for practitioners from graduate students and senior scientists to policymakers in conservation and environmental management.

Ecologists now recognize that the dynamics of populations, communities, and ecosystems are strongly affected by adaptive individual behaviors. Yet until now, we have lacked effective and flexible methods for modeling such dynamics. Traditional ecological models become impractical with the inclusion of behavior, and the optimization approaches of behavioral ecology cannot be used when future conditions are unpredictable due to feedbacks from the behavior of other individuals. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to state- and prediction-based theory, or SPT, a powerful new approach to modeling trade-off behaviors in contexts such as individual-based population models where feedbacks and variability make optimization impossible. This book features a wealth of examples that range from highly simplified behavior models to complex population models in which individuals make adaptive trade-off decisions about habitat and activity selection in highly heterogeneous environments. The book explains how SPT builds on key concepts from the state-based dynamic modeling theory of behavioral ecology, and how it combines explicit predictions of future conditions with approximations of a fitness measure to represent how individuals make good—not optimal—decisions that they revise as conditions change. The resulting models are realistic, testable, adaptable, and invaluable for answering fundamental questions in ecology and forecasting ecological outcomes of real-world scenarios.

Our species has transitioned from being one among millions on Earth to the species that is single-handedly transforming the entire planet to suit its own needs. In order to meet the daunting challenges of environmental sustainability in this epoch of human domination—known as the Anthropocene—ecologists have begun to think differently about the interdependencies between humans and the natural world. This book provides the best available introduction to what this new ecology is all about—and why it matters more than ever before. It describes how the science of ecology is evolving to provide a better understanding of how human agency is shaping the natural world, often in never-before-seen ways. The book emphasizes the importance of conserving species diversity, because it can offer a portfolio of options to keep our ecosystems resilient in the face of environmental change. It envisions humans taking on new roles as thoughtful stewards of the environment to ensure that ecosystems have the enduring capacity to supply the environmental services on which our economic well-being—and our very existence—depend. It offers the ecological know-how to maintain and enhance our planet's environmental performance and ecosystem production for the benefit of current and future generations. The book shows how today's ecology can provide the insights we need to appreciate the crucial role we play in this era of unprecedented global environmental transition.

This is the first book to critically review the application of phylogenetic methods in ecology, and it serves as a primer to working ecologists and students of ecology wishing to understand these methods. The book demonstrates how phylogenetic information is transforming ecology by offering fresh ways to estimate the similarities and differences among species, and by providing deeper, evolutionary-based insights on species distributions, coexistence, and niche partitioning. It examines this emerging area's explosive growth, allowing for this new body of hypotheses testing. It systematically looks at all the main areas of current ecophylogenetic methodology, testing, and inference. Each chapter covers a unique topic, emphasizes key assumptions, and introduces the appropriate statistical methods and null models required for testing phylogenetically informed hypotheses. The applications presented throughout are supported and connected by examples relying on real-world data that have been analyzed using the open-source programming language, R. Showing how phylogenetic methods are shedding light on fundamental ecological questions related to species coexistence, conservation, and global change, the book will interest anyone who thinks that evolution might be important in their data.

This book is a comprehensive reference to all aspects of pollination biology—and the first fully up-to-date resource of its kind to appear in decades. The beautifully illustrated book describes how flowers use colors, shapes, and scents to advertise themselves; how they offer pollen and nectar as rewards; and how they share complex interactions with beetles, birds, bats, bees, and other creatures. The ecology of these interactions is covered in depth, including the timing and patterning of flowering, competition among flowering plants to attract certain visitors and deter others, and the many ways that plants and animals can cheat each other. The book pays special attention to the prevalence of specialization and generalization in animal–flower interactions, and examines how a lack of distinction between casual visitors and true pollinators can produce misleading conclusions about flower evolution and animal–flower mutualism. The book also gives insights into the vital pollination services that animals provide to crops and native flora, and sets these issues in the context of today’s global pollination crisis.

Most organisms show substantial changes in size or morphology after they become independent of their parents and have to find their own food. Furthermore, the rate at which these changes occur generally depends on the amount of food they ingest. This book advances a synthetic and individual-based theory of the effects of this plastic ontogenetic development on the dynamics of populations and communities. The book shows how the effects of ontogenetic development on ecological dynamics critically depend on the efficiency with which differently sized individuals convert food into new biomass. Differences in this efficiency—or ontogenetic asymmetry—lead to bottlenecks in and thus population regulation by either maturation or reproduction. The book investigates the community consequences of these bottlenecks for trophic configurations that vary in the number and type of interacting species and in the degree of ontogenetic niche shifts exhibited by their individuals. They also demonstrate how insights into the effects of maturation and reproduction limitation on community equilibrium carry over to the dynamics of size-structured populations and give rise to different types of cohort-driven cycles. Featuring numerous examples and tests of modeling predictions, this book provides a pioneering and extensive theoretical and empirical treatment of the ecology of ontogenetic growth and development in organisms, emphasizing the importance of an individual-based perspective for understanding population and community dynamics.

Ecologists traditionally regard time as part of the background against which ecological interactions play out. This book argues that time should be treated as a resource used by organisms for growth, maintenance, and offspring production. The book uses insights from phenology—the study of the timing of life-cycle events—to present a theoretical framework of time in ecology that casts long-standing observations in the field in an entirely new light. Combining conceptual models with field data, the book demonstrates how phenological advances, delays, and stasis, documented in an array of taxa, can all be viewed as adaptive components of an organism's strategic use of time. The book shows how the allocation of time by individual organisms to critical life history stages is not only a response to environmental cues but also an important driver of interactions at the population, species, and community levels. To demonstrate the applications of this exciting new conceptual framework, the book uses meta-analyses of previous studies as well as the author's original data on the phenological dynamics of plants, caribou, and muskoxen in Greenland.