Pressestimmen
'I appreciated the refreshing narrative style of presentation. The reader is engaged in the material, which is well organized and clearly presented. There is a nice assortment of examples provided to illustrate and reinforce each point. The authors appear to have succeeded in reaching their intended audience.' "Good introductory ecology texts are rare. They should stimulate further inquiry and should be topical, clear and exciting. They should be comprehensive enough to include the major principles without requiring further resources, yet should be well referenced. Examples should be relevant to the student's local environment, while reflecting biogeographical regions and world ecosystem types. Introductory Ecology comes close to satisfying all these requirements...Ecology texts often fail to travel across the Atlantic, but this volume includes authors from the US and UK - and a breadth of relevant examples given in an American textbook style - and is in my view the best to be found outside Open University texts...Overall, this is a good introduction to what is acknowleged to be a complex subject." Tony Andrew, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Times Higher Education Supplement, May 2003
Kurzbeschreibung
This book is a core introductory text which examines basic principles of ecology for first year undergraduates. The authors have expertise in population ecology and plant ecophysiology which will give the book a balanced treatment of plant and animal ecology and a strong applied and evolutionary bias. The book will not present ecology as a tight, predictive science in the way that other areas of biology (such as genetics) can be. Instead, it will aim to give the student a good grounding in the basics of ecology, including patterns in biodiversity, population biology, the ecology of assemblages and the interpretation of ecological data. It will also try to stress the links between different aspects and different levels and also emphasise the overall intellectual coherence of the subject.
