The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems

The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 362
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781118223277
ISBN-13 : 1118223276
Rating : 4/5 (77 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems by : J. Philip Grime

Download or read book The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems written by J. Philip Grime and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES THAT SHAPE ECOSYSTEMS In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote “I think”, and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of Darwin’s tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation – adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but also to life with other living things. However, more than 150 years since Darwin published his singular idea of natural selection, the science of ecology has yet to account for how contrasting evolutionary outcomes affect the ability of organisms to coexist in communities and to regulate ecosystem functioning. In this book Philip Grime and Simon Pierce explain how evidence from across the world is revealing that, beneath the wealth of apparently limitless and bewildering variation in detailed structure and functioning, the essential biology of all organisms is subject to the same set of basic interacting constraints on life-history and physiology. The inescapable resulting predicament during the evolution of every species is that, according to habitat, each must adopt a predictable compromise with regard to how they use the resources at their disposal in order to survive. The compromise involves the investment of resources in either the effort to acquire more resources, the tolerance of factors that reduce metabolic performance, or reproduction. This three-way trade-off is the irreducible core of the universal adaptive strategy theory which Grime and Pierce use to investigate how two environmental filters selecting, respectively, for convergence and divergence in organism function determine the identity of organisms in communities, and ultimately how different evolutionary strategies affect the functioning of ecosystems. This book refl ects an historic phase in which evolutionary processes are finally moving centre stage in the effort to unify ecological theory, and animal, plant and microbial ecology have begun to find a common theoretical framework. Companion website This book has a companion website www.wiley.com/go/grime/evolutionarystrategies with Figures and Tables from the book for downloading.


The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems Related Books

The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems
Language: en
Pages: 362
Authors: J. Philip Grime
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-03-26 - Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

THE EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES THAT SHAPE ECOSYSTEMS In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote “I think”, and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-
Green Roof Ecosystems
Language: en
Pages: 451
Authors: Richard K. Sutton
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-06-04 - Publisher: Springer

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book provides an up-to-date coverage of green (vegetated) roof research, design, and management from an ecosystem perspective. It reviews, explains, and po
Plant Strategies
Language: en
Pages: 465
Authors: Daniel Laughlin
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2023-07-27 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How do plants make a living? Some plants are gamblers, others are swindlers. Some plants are habitual spenders while others are strugglers and miserly savers. P
Plant Functional Diversity
Language: en
Pages: 255
Authors: Eric Garnier
Categories: Nature
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Biological diversity, the variety of living organisms on Earth, is traditionally viewed as the diversity of taxa, and species in particular. However, other face
A Primer of Life Histories
Language: en
Pages: 208
Authors: Jeffrey A. Hutchings
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-09-15 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Life histories can be defined as the means by which individuals (or more precisely genotypes) vary their age- or stage-specific expenditures of reproductive eff