Ecology and Ecosystem Conservation

Writing for an audience that includes undergraduate environmental studies majors and environmental conservation professionals, Schmitz (Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies) offers a text that aims to describe the links between biodiversity and the structure and functioning of ecosystems. The major research issues he addresses include the role of ecological science in decision making, the factors that govern the assembly of ecosystems and determine their response to various stressors, the functioning of the earth's climate system and its role in the determination of the distribution of life on earth, population size control factors, the population level consequences of species' life-history adaptation, the role of the fragmentation of the landscape in the persistence of species on the landscape, the role of biological diversity in ecosystem processes, and the ecological principles that need to be considered in the design of strategies intended to protect biological diversity. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)