The Pemberley Bookshop

Why not come and peruse our comprehensive range of natural history titles at our well stocked bookshop, where you can also receive our expert advice. Click here for details of our shop.

Energetic Food Webs: An Analysis of Real and Model Ecosystems

by Moore, J.C.; de Ruiter, P.C.

Series : Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution
Collection : Prof Jim Green
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Illustrations : text figs

Description:

In ecosystems with many species, food webs form highly complex networks of resource-consumer interactions. At the same time, the food web as itself needs sufficient resources to develop and survive. So in fact, food web ecology is about how natural resources form the basis of biological communities, in terms of species richness and abundances as well as how species are organised in communities on the basis of the resource availability and use. The central theme of this book is that patterns in the utilisation of energy result from the trophic interactions among species, and that these patterns form the basis of ecosystem stability.

The authors integrate the latest work on community dynamics, ecosystem energetics, and stability, and in so doing attempt to dispel the categorisation of the field into the separate subdisciplines of population, community, and ecosystem ecology. Energetic Food Webs represents the first attempt to bridge the gap between the energetic and species approaches to ecology.