This book is an outgrowth of one phase of an upper-division course on quantitative ecology, given each year for the past eight at Berkeley. I am most grateful to the students in that course and to many graduate students in the Berkeley Department of Zoology and Colleges of Engineering and Natural Resources whose spirited discussions inspired much of the book's content. I also am deeply grateful to those faculty colleagues with whom, at one time or another, I have shared courses or seminars in ecology or population biology, D.M. Auslander, L. Demetrius, G. Oster, O.H. Paris, F.A. Pitelka, A.M....

According to a recent report of the United States Census Bureau, world population as of June 30, 1983, was estimated at about 4. 7 billion people; of this total, an estimated 82 million had been added in the previous year. World population in 1950 was estimated at about 2. 5 billion; consequently, if 82 million poeple are added to the world population in each of the coming four years, population size will be double that of 1950. Another way of viewing the yearly increase in world population is to compare it to 234 million, the estimated current population of the United States. If the excess...

It is part of the ideology of science that it is an international enterprise, carried out by a community that knows no barriers of nation or culture. But the reality is somewhat different. Despite the best intentions of scientists to form a single community, unseparated by differences of national and political viewpoint, they are, in fact, separated by language. Scientific literature in German is not generally assimilated by French workers, nor that appearing in French by those whose native language is English. The problem appears to have become more severe since the last war, because the...