Aquatic Food Webs: An Ecosystem Approach

This volume provides a current synthesis of theoretical and empirical food web research. Whether they are binary systems or weighted networks, food webs are of particular interest to ecologists in providing a macroscopic view of ecosystems. They describe interactions between species and their environment, and subsequent advances in the understanding of their structure, function, and dynamics are of vital importance to ecosystem management and conservation. Aquatic Food Webs provides a synthesis of the current issues in food web theory and its applications, covering issues of structure, function, scaling, complexity, and stability in the contexts of conservation, fisheries, and climate. Although the focus of this volume is upon aquatic food webs (where many of the recent advances have been made), any ecologist with an interest in food web theory and its applications will find the issues addressed in this book of value and use. This advanced textbook is suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers in community, ecosystem, and theoretical ecology, in aquatic ecology, and in conservation biology.

Andrea Belgrano is a Researcher at the National Center for Genome Resources, University of New Mexico. Ursula Scharler is a Fellow of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center at the University of Maryland. Jennifer Dunne is an ecologist with interests in computational ecology and ecoinformatics. She is a co-founder and the assistant director of the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab, a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, and a principal investigator at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Robert E. Ulanowicz is Professor of Theoretical Ecology with the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. His current interests include network analysis of trophic exchanges in ecosystems, information theory as applied to ecological systems, the thermodynamics of living systems, causality in living systems, and modelling subtropical wetland ecosystems in Florida and Belize.