Books in the Ecological Methods and Concepts series

Students often find it difficult to grasp fundamental ecological and evolutionary concepts because of their inherently mathematical nature. Likewise, the application of ecological and evolutionary theory often requires a high degree of mathematical competence.

Insect Sampling in Forest Ecosystems highlights the problems faced by entomologists working in forest ecosystems.

At present, most books on ecological modelling rely on very complex mathematics, resulting in students and researchers shying away from investigating the potential uses of ecological models and their methods of construction. This new book aims to open up this exciting area to a much wider audience.

* Provides up-to-date summaries of the latest molecular approaches in this rapidly expanding field. * Gives guidance on the appropriate choice of methods for particular problems in ecology, and their strengths and limitations.

Ecologists are increasingly tackling difficult issues like global change, loss of biodiversity and sustainability of ecosystem services. These and related questions are enormously challenging, requiring unprecedented multidisciplinary collaboration and rapid synthesis of large amounts of diverse data into information and ultimately knowledge.

This book highlights new and emerging uses of stable isotope analysis in a variety of ecological disciplines. While the use of natural abundance isotopes in ecological research is now relatively standard, new techniques and ways of interpreting patterns are developing rapidly.

Trace gases are those that are present in the atmosphere at relatively low concentrations. Small changes in their concentrations can have profound implications for major atmospheric fluxes, and thereore, can be used as indicators in studies of global change, global biogeochemical cycling and global warming.

The purpose of this text is to introduce some techniques for dealing with problems such as the description of spatial patterns of populations across continents, the description of the degree of fragmentation of a population and the relationship between population dynamics and population fraction.