Analysis of Ecological Communities offers a rationale and guidance for selecting appropriate, effective, analytical methods in community ecology. The book is suitable as a textbook and reference book on methods for multivariate analysis of ecological communities and their environments. The book covers distance measures, data transformation, outlier analysis, coordination, cluster analysis, PCA RA, CA, DCA, NMS, NMS, CCA, Bray-Curtis, MRPP, Mantel test, discriminant analysis, twinspan, classification and regression trees, structural equation modeling, and more. It also includes brief treatments of community sampling and diversity measures. The 304 page book is richly illustrated. It provides many examples from the literature and demonstrations of basic principles with simulated and real data sets.

Interactions between species are of fundamental importance to all living systems and the framework we have for studying these interactions is community ecology. This is important to our understanding of the planets biological diversity and how species interactions relate to the functioning of ecosystems at all scales. Species do not live in isolation and the study of community ecology is of practical application in a wide range of conservation issues. The study of ecological community data involves many methods of analysis. In this book you will learn many of the mainstays of community analysis including: diversity, similarity and cluster analysis, ordination and multivariate analyses. This book is for undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers seeking a step-by-step methodology for analysing plant and animal communities using R and Excel. Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet is virtually ubiquitous and familiar to most computer users. It is a robust program that makes an excellent storage and manipulation system for many kinds of data, including community data. The R program is a powerful and flexible analytical system able to conduct a huge variety of analytical methods, which means that the user only has to learn one program to address many research questions. Its other advantage is that it is open source and therefore completely free. Novel analytical methods are being added constantly to the already comprehensive suite of tools available in R. Mark Gardener is both an ecologist and an analyst. He has worked in a range of ecosystems around the world and has been involved in research across a spectrum of community types. His knowledge of R is largely self-taught and this gives him insight into the needs of students learning to use R for complicated analyses.

This work is the first to focus systematically on a much-debated topic: the conceptual issues of community ecology, including the nature of evidence in ecology, the role of experiments, attempts to disprove hypotheses, and the value of negative evidence in the discipline. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Community ecology is the study of the interactions between populations of co-existing species. Co-edited by two prominent community ecologists and featuring contributions from top researchers in the field, this book provides a survey of the state-of-the-art in both the theory and applications of the discipline. It pays special attention to topology, dynamics, and the importance of spatial and temporal scale while also looking at applications to emerging problems in human-dominated ecosystems (including the restoration and reconstruction of viable communities). Community Ecology: Processes, Models, and Applications adopts a mainly theoretical approach and focuses on the use of network-based theory, which remains little explored in standard community ecology textbooks. The book includes discussion of the effects of biotic invasions on natural communities; the linking of ecological network structure to empirically measured community properties and dynamics; the effects of evolution on community patterns and processes; and the integration of fundamental interactions into ecological networks. A final chapter indicates future research directions for the discipline.

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Interactions between competitors, predators and their prey have traditionally been viewed as the foundation of community structure. Parasites – long ignored in community ecology – are now recognized as playing an important part in influencing species interactions and consequently affecting ecosystem function. Parasitism can interact with other ecological drivers, resulting in both detrimental and beneficial effects on biodiversity and ecosystem health. Species interactions involving parasites are also key to understanding many biological invasions and emerging infectious diseases. This book bridges the gap between community ecology and epidemiology to create a wide-ranging examination of how parasites and pathogens affect all aspects of ecological communities, enabling the new generation of ecologists to include parasites as a key consideration in their studies. This comprehensive guide to a newly emerging field is of relevance to academics, practitioners and graduates in biodiversity, conservation and population management, and animal and human health.

In Habitats and Ecological Communities of Indiana, leading experts assess the health and diversity of Indiana's eight wildlife habitats, providing detailed analysis, data-generated maps, color photographs, and complete lists of flora and fauna. This groundbreaking reference details the state's forests, grasslands, wetlands, aquatic systems, barren lands, and subterranean systems, and describes the nature and impact of two man-made habitats—agricultural and developed lands. The book considers extirpated and endangered species alongside invasives and exotics, and evaluates floral and faunal distribution at century intervals to chart ecological change.

A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological communities? What other scientific areas might serve as a guiding framework? As it turns out, the core focus of community ecology—understanding patterns of diversity and composition of biological variants across space and time—is shared by evolutionary biology and its very coherent conceptual framework, population genetics theory. The Theory of Ecological Communities takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole. Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching processes: selection among species, drift, dispersal, and speciation. These are analogues of the four central processes in population genetics theory—selection within species, drift, gene flow, and mutation—and together they subsume almost all of the many dozens of more specific models built to describe the dynamics of communities of interacting species. The result is a theory that allows the effects of many low-level processes, such as competition, facilitation, predation, disturbance, stress, succession, colonization, and local extinction to be understood as the underpinnings of high-level processes with widely applicable consequences for ecological communities. Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, The Theory of Ecological Communities provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.

Network thinking and network analysis are rapidly expanding features of ecological research. Network analysis of ecological systems include representations and modelling of the interactions in an ecosystem, in which species or factors are joined by pairwise connections. This book provides an overview of ecological network analysis including generating processes, the relationship between structure and dynamic function, and statistics and models for these networks. Starting with a general introduction to the composition of networks and their characteristics, it includes details on such topics as measures of network complexity, applications of spectral graph theory, how best to include indirect species interactions, and multilayer, multiplex and multilevel networks. Graduate students and researchers who want to develop and understand ecological networks in their research will find this volume inspiring and helpful. Detailed guidance to those already working in network ecology but looking for advice is also included.