In the summer of 1993, twenty-six graduate and postdoctoral stu dents and fourteen lecturers converged on Cornell University for a summer school devoted to structured-population models. This school was one of a series to address concepts cutting across the traditional boundaries separating terrestrial, marine, and freshwa ter ecology. Earlier schools resulted in the books Patch Dynamics (S. A. Levin, T. M. Powell & J. H. Steele, eds., Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1993) and Ecological Time Series (T. M. Powell & J. H. Steele, eds., Chapman and Hall, New York, 1995); a book on food webs is in...

To say you are writing about rarity is to invite two kinds of response. Either one provokes a discussion of what rarity is, or some comment on the complex ity of the subject. The objective of this book is to explore the nature of rarity, its complexity if you like, from one particular perspective on what rarity is. Primarily, it is an opportunity to review, to synthesize, and to question. The book is an attempt to draw together a vast body of literature, to extract from it some general principles, and to raise question marks over areas the founda tions of which appear to be either absent or...

This text brings together many techniques of multivariate analysis appropriate for ecological data. The techniques include the familiar, and some less familiar, methods for ordination and classification, and also some special techniques (for example, methods for analyzing asymmetric association matrices and for comparing several different ordinations). A key is provided to assist in choice of methods. A particular strength of the book lies in the numerous illustrative examples.