Aquatic Food Webs An Ecosystem Approach

by Belgrano, Andrea; Scharler, Ursula M.; Dunne, Jennifer; Ulanowicz, Robert E.

• ISBN13: 9780198564829
• ISBN10: 0198564821
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This volume provides a current synthesis of theoretical and empirical food web research. Whether they are binary systems or weighted networks, food webs are of particular interest to ecologists in providing a macroscopic view of ecosystems. They describe interactions between species and their environment, and subsequent advances in the understanding of their structure, function, and dynamics are of vital importance to ecosystem management and conservation. Aquatic Food Webs provides a synthesis of the current issues in food web theory and its applications, covering issues of structure, function, scaling, complexity, and stability in the contexts of conservation, fisheries, and climate. Although the focus of this volume is upon aquatic food webs (where many of the recent advances have been made), any ecologist with an interest in food web theory and its applications will find the issues addressed in this book of value and use. This advanced textbook is suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers in community, ecosystem, and theoretical ecology, in aquatic ecology, and in conservation biology.

Author Biography

Andrea Belgrano is a Researcher at the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ursula Scharler is a Fellow of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center at the University of Maryland. Jennifer Dunne is an ecologist with interests in computational ecology and ecoinformatics. She is a co-founder and the assistant director of the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab, a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, and a principal investigator at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Robert E. Ulanowicz is Professor of Theoretical Ecology with the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. His current interests include network analysis of trophic exchanges in ecosystems, information theory as applied to ecological systems, the thermodynamics of living systems, causality in living systems, and modelling subtropical wetland ecosystems in Florida and Belize.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. v
Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Structure and function	p. 5
Biosimplicity via stoichiometry: the evolution of food-web structure and processes	p. 7
Spatial structure and dynamics in a marine food web	p. 19
Role of network analysis in comparative ecosystem ecology of estuaries	p. 25
Food webs in lakes-seasonal dynamics and the impact of climate variability	p. 41
Pattern and process in food webs: evidence from running waters	p. 51
Examining food-web theories	p. 67
Some random thoughts on the statistical analysis of food-web data	p. 69
Analysis of size and complexity of randomly constructed food webs by information theoretic metrics	p. 73
Size-based analyses of aquatic food webs	p. 86
Food-web theory in marine ecosystems	p. 98
Stability and diversity in food webs	p. 115
Modeling food-web dynamics: complexity-stability implications	p. 117
Is biodiversity maintained by food-web complexity?-the adaptive food-web hypothesis	p. 130
Climate forcing, food web structure, and community dynamics in pelagic marine ecosystems	p. 143
Food-web theory provides guidelines for marine conservation	p. 170
Biodiversity and aquatic food webs	p. 184
Concluding remarks	p. 199
Ecological network analysis: an escape from the machine	p. 201
Afterword	p. 208
References	p. 211
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