Food Webs and Biodiversity
Foundations, Models, Data
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Beschreibung
Food webs have now been addressed in empirical and theoretical research for more than 50 years. Yet, even elementary foundational issues are still hotly debated. One difficulty is that a multitude of processes need to be taken into account to understand the patterns found empirically in the structure of food webs and communities.
Food Webs and Biodiversity develops a fresh, comprehensive perspective on food webs. Mechanistic explanations for several known macroecological patterns are derived from a few fundamental concepts, which are quantitatively linked to field-observables. An argument is developed that food webs will often be the key to understanding patterns of biodiversity at community level.
Key Features:
* Predicts generic characteristics of ecological communities in invasion-extirpation equilibrium.
* Generalizes the theory of competition to food webs with arbitrary topologies.
* Presents a new, testable quantitative theory for the mechanisms determining species richness in food webs, and other new results.
* Written by an internationally respected expert in the field.
With global warming and other pressures on ecosystems rising, understanding and protecting biodiversity is a cause of international concern. This highly topical book will be of interest to a wide ranging audience, including not only graduate students and practitioners in community and conservation ecology but also the complex-systems research community as well as mathematicians and physicists interested in the theory of networks.
"This is a comprehensive work outlining a large array of very novel and potentially game-changing ideas in food web ecology."
--Ken Haste Andersen, Technical University of Denmark
"I believe that this will be a landmark book in community ecology ... it presents a well-established and consistent mathematical theory of food-webs. It is testable in many ways and the author finds remarkable agreements between predictions and reality."
--Géza Meszéna, Eötvös University, Budapest
Autor*in
Axel G. Rossberg
Themen in »Food Webs and Biodiversity«
Biodiversität Biodiversity Biowissenschaften Ecology & Organismal Biology Life Sciences Ökologie Ökologie / Populationen u. Lebensgemeinschaften Ökologie u. Biologie der Organismen Population & Community Ecology