Cliffs are present in virtually every country on earth. The lack of scientific interest in cliffs to date is in striking contrast to the commonness of cliffs around the world and to the attraction cliffs have had for humans throughout history. Cliffs provide a unique habitat, rarely investigated from an ecological viewpoint. This book aims to destroy the impression of cliffs as geological structures devoid of life, by reviewing information about the geology, geomorphology, microclimate, flora, and fauna of both sea and inland cliffs. For the first time, evidence is presented to suggest that...

The Background of Ecology is a critical and up-to-date review of the origins and development of ecology, with emphasis on the major concepts and theories shared in the ecological traditions of plant and animal ecology, limnology, and oceanography. The work traces developments in each of these somewhat isolated areas and identifies, where possible, parallels or convergences among them. Dr McIntosh describes how ecology emerged as a science in the context of nineteenth-century natural histor

This book deals with the lifestyles of phytoplankton, the microscopic plant life living in the open waters of lakes, ponds and rivers and makes frequent references to the phytoplankton of the sea. It reviews adaptations required of organisms to live their lives independently of solid surfaces and the different ways that these have been achieved. Chapters dealing with particular topics are arranged in approximately the order in which they become a problem to the organism: How can it stay up in the water? Can it gain sufficient light and nutrients? How fast can it grow under different...

Ecologists are making increasing use of computer methods in analyzing ecological data on plant and animal communities. Ecological problems naturally involve numerous variables and numerous individuals or samples. Multivariate techniques permit the summary of large, complex sets of data and provide the means to tackle many problems that cannot be investigated experimentally because of practical restraints. Ecologists are thus enabled to group similar species and similar sample sites together, and to generate hypotheses about environmental and historical factors that affect the communities....

It is generally recognized that larger animals eat more, live longer, have larger offspring, and so on; but it is unusual to see these commonplace observations as a basis for scientific biology. A large number of empirically based relationships describe biological rates as simple functions of body size; and other such relations predict the intrinsic rate of population growth, animal speed, animal density, territory size, prey size, physiology, and morphology. Such equations almost always exist for mammals and birds, often for other vertebrates and invertebrates, sometimes for protozoa, algae,...

Many people learn the rudiments of the nitrogen cycle while at school. However, the details of the various processes in the cycle and their magnitude are still not fully understood. Some of them are of great current interest, for example use of nitrogen fixing crops to feed the increasing world population and the problems of pollution of groundwaters by nitrates. While some of the world needs to fix nitrogen, other parts are using natural processes of denitrification (forming nitrogen gas) as a way of getting rid of waste from humans and intensively farmed animals.

This book describes the...

A great many terrestrial plants live in close association with fungi. The features of this association known as mycorrhiza, are those of a mutualistic symbiosis. Almost all plants form mycorrhizae whereby the fungus provides soil resources to the plant in exchange for energy manufactured by the plant. The symbiosis means greater productivity under stress for the plant and a steady energy supply for the fungus. This book addresses the diverse and complex ways in which mycorrhizae affect the mechanisms for plant survival as individuals and populations, for community structure, and for ecosystem...

Ecological Experiments stresses the importance of manipulative field experimentation in ecology as being superior to the observational method. The book begins with a series of ecological questions that can be answered by experiments, such as: what is the importance of competition among scientists? The minimal requirements of experimental design that should be met for satisfactory field experiments are then introduced, and examples of good and poor experiments from the literature are examined in this light along with a consideration of the trade-offs that may be forced on the experiment by the...

This book focuses on introduced plant species: their origins and impacts on native vegetation and ecosystems as well as the potential for their control. Aimed at advanced students and land managers concerned with plant community conservation, it includes practical explanations, case studies and an introduction to basic techniques for evaluating the impacts of invasive plants.

The mechanisms of macroevolutionary change are a contentious issue. Paleoecological evidence, presented in this book, shows that evolutionary processes visible in ecological time cannot be used to predict macroevolutionary trends, contrary to Darwin's original thesis. The author discusses how climatic oscillations on ice-age timescales are paced by variations in the Earth's orbit, and have thus been a permanent feature of Earth history. There is, however, little evidence for macroevolutionary change in response to these climatic changes, suggesting that over geological time, macroevolution...