The Loom of Life: Unravelling Ecosystems - Hardcover

Schilthuizen, Menno

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3540680519 ISBN 13: 9783540680512

Publisher: Springer, 2008

Synopsis

In an age of increasing environmental problems, ecology has had to grow up fast from a discipline dealing with relatively simple interactions between species to one that tries to explain changes in global patterns of diversity and richness. The issues are complex. Every species may seem to have its own unique role, but if that is true, then why are there hundreds of species of plankton in an ecosystem with only a handful of niches? The tropics have a high biodiversity, but does anybody know why? And how can a single introduced tree species wreak havoc in Hawaii’s rainforests, when it is one of thousands of quietly coexisting tree species in its native continent, South America?
The strength of this book is that it will help digest some of these more complex issues in the ecology of biodiversity. It will do this by zooming out from the local scale to the global scale in a number of steps, marrying community ecology with macroecology, and introducing unexpected nuggets of natural history along the way. The reader will notice that, the larger the scale, the more the familiar niche-concept appears to be overshadowed by exotic fields from fractal and complexity theory. However, scientists differ in opinion on the scale at which niches become irrelevant. These differences of opinion, but also the search for unified ecological theories, will form another force by which the story will be carried along to its conclusion. A conclusion which, surprisingly, seeks to find a glimpse of the globe's future in the traces from its past.

About this title

About the Author

The author (born in 1965) is a Dutch biologist and science writer with a doctorate from Leiden University. In 2001, he published Frogs, Flies and Dandelions, an Oxford University Press trade book on speciation, which was favourably reviewed in Nature and in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and translated into French, Dutch and Greek. The author writes news stories and feature articles on ecology and evolution for New Scientist, Natural History, Science, and various national newspapers in Belgium, the Netherlands and Malaysia. From 2000 to 2006, he was an associate professor in the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Malaysian Borneo. Since 2007, he has been director of research at the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has published about 55 scientific papers on tropical ecology, systematics and evolutionary biology, mostly involving land snails and insects.

 

From the Back Cover

How can thousands of tree species coexist in a patch of tropical rainforest where there seem to be just a handful of niches? Why does biodiversity boom at the equator and plummet at the poles? Questions like these are central to modern ecology, where the gap between the familiar "niche" and the staggering (but sharply decreasing) global biodiversity seems to become ever wider. This book helps students and the general reader to bridge that gap, by tip-toeing from the smallest to the largest ecosystems.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3540680519
• ISBN 13: 9783540680512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 184