This informative book, first published in 1987, presents the theories of community ecology within the context of a natural example. The text describes and examines issues in community ecology and shows how research on salamanders has helped to solve some of the problems surrounding the theories. Salamanders exist in stable populations of the kind assumed in community theory and are more appropriate than most other animals for research on the applications of that theory. The interesting and meaningful results, collected from observation on these excellent subjects posed challenges to beliefs within community ecology. Life histories of salamanders, fieldwork in distinctly differing habitats, competition, predation and evolution are discussed in an easily readable text. Professional ecologists and students of community ecology and herpetology will be interedted in the information synthesised in this book.
Ecological Experiments stresses the importance to ecology of field experiments, where variables are manipulated in order to collect data on specific hypotheses, as opposed to the more passive observational method. The book begins by introducing a series of ecological questions that can be addressed experimentally for example, what is the significance of competition among species? The minimal requirements of experimental design that must be met are then introduced, together with examples of good and poor experiments from the ecological literature and a consideration of the trade-offs that may be forced on the experimenter by field conditions. All ecologists, and especially students beginning their careers in field study, will find in this text a good introduction to the experimental foundation of ecology.
This is a major new textbook that is intended to lead students away from purely descriptive zoology courses into an experimental approach that emphasizes asking and answering questions about nature. The book gives a panoramic view of vertebrate life, classification, ecology and behaviour. Section I of the book describes the major groups of vertebrates and their origins. The second section covers classification and its methodology. Section III describes the ecology of vertebrates from two standpoints: how individuals cope with environmental extremes, and principles of population and community ecology as illustrated by experiments carried out in the field. Section IV describes the geographic distribution of vertebrates. The fifth section discusses migration. Vertebrate behaviour is the subject of the final section and covers observations and the theories and experiments they have inspired.
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