Ecology of Populations

This book aims to bring together analytical population dynamics, random processes and community structure into a common framework.

Esa Ranta (Author), Per Lundberg (Author), Veijo Kaitala (Author)

9780521854351, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 December 2005

388 pages, 147 b/w illus. 2 tables
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm, 0.746 kg

"...the strenghts of the book lie primarily in its accessibility and proximity to the cutting edge of population ecology research."
Robert P. Freckleton, Ecology

The theme of the book is the distribution and abundance of organisms in space and time. The core of the book lies in how local births and deaths are tied to emigration and immigration processes, and how environmental variability at different scales affects population dynamics with stochastic processes and spatial structure and shows how elementary analytical tools can be used to understand population fluctuations, synchrony, processes underlying range distributions and community structure and species coexistence. The book also shows how spatial population dynamics models can be used to understand life history evolution and aspects of evolutionary game theory. Although primarily based on analytical and numerical analyses of spatial population processes, data from several study systems are also dealt with.

1. Introduction
2. Population renewal
3. Population dynamics in space - the first step
4. Synchronicity
5. Order- disorder in space and time
6. Structured populations
7. Biodiversity and community structure
8. Habitat loss
9. Harvesting and management
10. Resource matching
11. Spatial games
12. Evolutionary and population dynamics
13. Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Animal ecology [PSVS], Plant ecology [PSTS], Ecological science, the Biosphere [PSAF]