Adaptive Food Webs: Stability and Transitions of Real and Model Ecosystems

Presenting new approaches to studying food webs, this book uses practical management and policy examples to demonstrate the theory behind ecosystem management decisions and the broader issue of sustainability. All the information that readers need to use food web analyses as a tool for understanding and quantifying transition processes is provided. Advancing the idea of food webs as complex adaptive systems, readers are challenged to rethink how changes in environmental conditions affect these systems. Beginning with the current state of thinking about community organisation, complexity and stability, the book moves on to focus on the traits of organisms, the adaptive nature of communities and their impacts on ecosystem function. The final section of the book addresses the applications to management and sustainability. By helping to understand the complexities of multispecies networks, this book provides insights into the evolution of organisms and the fate of ecosystems in a changing world.

John C. Moore is a Professor, Founding Head of the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, and Director of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. His research on food web structure, function and dynamics is positioned at the interfaces of community ecology, ecosystem ecology, and evolution. He pioneered the concepts that detritus is an important source of energy and stability in ecosystems.

Peter C. de Ruiter is Director of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam and occupies the Chair of Theoretical Ecology at Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the structure and stability of food webs, and the relationship between biological diversity, ecosystem functioning and environmental quality, in particular in soils.

Kevin S. McCann is Canadian Research Chair in Biodiversity at the University of Guelph, Ontario. A leading theoretical ecologist with an expertise in food webs and biodiversity, his research examines the biological structure underlying diversity and the critical relationship between biostructure, ecosystem function and stability. In 2013, McCann was only the second Canadian to be elected as a lifetime fellow to the Ecological Society of America for research achievements.

Volkmar Wolters is a Professor and Head of the Department of Animal Ecology and Systematic Zoology at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany. His research focusses on soil food webs, pollination webs, agricultural biodiversity and community ecology at the landscape scale. He is president of the Ecological Society of the German speaking countries (GfÖ), and is therefore engaged with policy-makers and key stakeholders in biodiversity and ecology issues.