About the Book
This volume provides a current synthesis of theoretical and empirical food web research. Whether they are binary systems or weighted networks, food webs are of particular interest to ecologists in providing a macroscopic view of ecosystems. They describe interactions between species and their environment, and subsequent advances in the understanding of their structure, function, and dynamics are of vital importance to ecosystem management and conservation. "Aquatic Food Webs" provides a synthesis of the current issues in food web theory and its applications, covering issues of structure, function, scaling, complexity, and stability in the contexts of conservation, fisheries, and climate. Although the focus of this volume is upon aquatic food webs (where many of the recent advances have been made), any ecologist with an interest in food web theory and its applications will find the issues addressed in this book of value and use. This advanced textbook is suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers in community, ecosystem, and theoretical ecology, in aquatic ecology, and in conservation biology.
Table of Contents:
Foreword, Michel Loreau
Introduction
1. Structure and Function
1. Biosimplicity via stoichiometry: the evolution of food-web structure and processes, James J. Elser and Dag O. Hessen
2. Spatial structure and dynamics in a marine food web, Carlos J. Melian, Jordi Bascompte, and Pedro Jordano
3. Role of network analysis in comparative ecosystem ecology of estuaries, Robert R. Christian, Daniel Baird, Joseph Luczkovich, Jeffrey C. Johnson, Ursula Scharler, and Robert E. Ulanowicz
4. Food webs in lakes - seasonal dynamics and impact of climate variability, Dietmar Straile
5. Pattern and process in food webs: evidence from running waters, Guy Woodward, Ross Thompson, Colin R Townsend, and Alan G Hildrew
2. Examining food web theories
6. Some random thoughts on the statistical analysis of food web data, Andrew R. Solow
7. Analysis of size and complexity of randomly constructed food webs by information theoretic metrics, James T. Morris, Robert R. Christian, and Robert E. Ulanowicz
8. Size-based analyses of aquatic food webs, Simon Jennings
9. Complexity in aquatic food webs: an ecosystem approach, Jason S. Link, William T. Stockhausen, and Elizabeth T. Methratta
3. Stability and diversity in food webs
10. Modelling food-web dynamics: complexity-stability implications, Jennifer A. Dunne, Ulrich Brose, Richard J. Williams and Neo D. Martinez
11. Is biodiversity maintained by food-web complexity? - The adaptive food-web hypothesis, Michio Kondoh
12. Climate forcing, food web structure, and community dynamics in pelagic marine ecosystems, L. Ciannelli, D.O. Hjermann, P. Lehodey, G. Ottersen, J.T. Duffy-Anderson, N.C. Stenseth
13. Food web theory provides guidelines for marine conservation, Enric Sala and George Sugihara
14. Biodiversity and aquatic food webs, Helmut Hillebrand and Jonathan B. Shurin
4. Concluding remarks
15. Ecological network analysis: an escape from the machine, Robert E. Ulanowicz
Afterword, Mathew Leibold
References
Index
About the Author :
Andrea Belgrano is a Researcher at the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ursula Scharler is a Fellow of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center at the University of Maryland. Jennifer Dunne is an ecologist with interests in computational ecology and ecoinformatics. She is a co-founder and the assistant director of the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab, a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, and a principal investigator at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Robert E. Ulanowicz is Professor of Theoretical Ecology with the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. His current interests include network analysis of trophic exchanges in ecosystems, information theory as applied to ecological systems, the thermodynamics of living systems, causality in living systems, and modelling subtropical wetland ecosystems in Florida and Belize.
Review :
This book gives a good background for all those interested in the theory and modelling aspects of aquatic food webs. There are certainly lessons to be learnt here for many. Journal of Plankton Research, Volume 28, Number 10 This is an important synthesis for foodweb ecologists to read and an accessible text for other ecologists. Mark Young, Bulletin of the British Ecological Society 2006, 37:1 ...the book provides a very modern and interesting presentations of current food web research. It is strongly recommended for readers interested in new methodological developments or conceptual novelties and are sensitive to spatio-temporal scale-dependence or the history of some great ecological problems...presents excellently the brand new developments in this huge field. It is not a book for aquatic ecologists only! Community Ecology 6(2): 253-255, 2006 Graduate students and professionals interested in communities and ecosystems, particularly those who work on food webs or in aquatic systems, will be well served to take a look at this book. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, April 2006.
