The theme of this book is the distribution of the abundance of organisms in space and time. Its core 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. The book shows how elementary analytical tools can be used to understand population fluctuations, synchrony, processes underlying range distributions and community structure and species coexistence, as well as how spatial population dynamics models can be used to understand life...

Ecology has long been shaped by ideas that stress the sharing of resources and the competition for those resources, and by the assumption that populations and communities typically exist under equilibrium conditions in habitats saturated with both individuals and species. However, much evidence contradicts these assumptions and it is likely that nonequilibrium is much more widespread than might be expected. This book is unique in focusing on nonequilibrium aspects of ecology, providing evidence for nonequilibrium and equilibrium in populations (and metapopulations), in extant communities and...

The theme of this book is the distribution of the abundance of organisms in space and time. Its core 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. The book shows how elementary analytical tools can be used to understand population fluctuations, synchrony, processes underlying range distributions and community structure and species coexistence, as well as how spatial population dynamics models can be used to understand life...