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Human impacts are dramatically altering our natural ecosystems but the exact repercussions on ecological sustainability and function remain unclear. As a result, food web theory has experienced a proliferation of research seeking to address these critical areas. Arguing that the various recent and classical food web theories can be looked at collectively and in a highly consistent and testable way, Food Webs synthesizes and reconciles modern and classical perspectives into a general unified theory. Kevin McCann brings together outcomes from population-, community-, and ecosystem-level approaches under the common currency of energy or material fluxes. He shows that these approaches--often studied in isolation--all have the same general implications in terms of population dynamic stability. Specifically, increased fluxes of energy or material tend to destabilize populations, communities, and whole ecosystems. With this understanding, stabilizing structures at different levels of the ecological hierarchy can be identified and any population-, community-, or ecosystem-level structures that mute energy or material flow also stabilize systems dynamics. McCann uses this powerful general framework to discuss the effects of human impact on the stability and sustainability of ecological systems, and he demonstrates that there is clear empirical evidence that the structures supporting ecological systems have been dangerously eroded. Uniting the latest research on food webs with classical theories, this book will be a standard source in the understanding of natural food web functions.

Most organisms show substantial changes in size or morphology after they become independent of their parents and have to find their own food. Furthermore, the rate at which these changes occur generally depends on the amount of food they ingest. In this book, Andre de Roos and Lennart Persson advance a synthetic and individual-based theory of the effects of this plastic ontogenetic development on the dynamics of populations and communities. De Roos and Persson show how the effects of ontogenetic development on ecological dynamics critically depend on the efficiency with which differently sized individuals convert food into new biomass. Differences in this efficiency--or ontogenetic asymmetry--lead to bottlenecks in and thus population regulation by either maturation or reproduction. De Roos and Persson investigate the community consequences of these bottlenecks for trophic configurations that vary in the number and type of interacting species and in the degree of ontogenetic niche shifts exhibited by their individuals. They also demonstrate how insights into the effects of maturation and reproduction limitation on community equilibrium carry over to the dynamics of size-structured populations and give rise to different types of cohort-driven cycles. Featuring numerous examples and tests of modeling predictions, this book provides a pioneering and extensive theoretical and empirical treatment of the ecology of ontogenetic growth and development in organisms, emphasizing the importance of an individual-based perspective for understanding population and community dynamics.

Despite often violent fluctuations in nature, species extinction is rare. California red scale, a potentially devastating pest of citrus, has been suppressed for fifty years in California to extremely low yet stable densities by its controlling parasitoid. Some larch budmoth populations undergo extreme cycles; others never cycle. In Consumer-Resource Dynamics, William Murdoch, Cherie Briggs, and Roger Nisbet use these and numerous other biological examples to lay the groundwork for a unifying theory applicable to predator-prey, parasitoid-host, and other consumer-resource interactions. Throughout, the focus is on how the properties of real organisms affect population dynamics. The core of the book synthesizes and extends the authors' own models involving insect parasitoids and their hosts, and explores in depth how consumer species compete for a dynamic resource. The emerging general consumer-resource theory accounts for how consumers respond to differences among individuals in the resource population. From here the authors move to other models of consumer-resource dynamics and population dynamics in general. Consideration of empirical examples, key concepts, and a necessary review of simple models is followed by examination of spatial processes affecting dynamics, and of implications for biological control of pest organisms. The book establishes the coherence and broad applicability of consumer-resource theory and connects it to single-species dynamics. It closes by stressing the theory's value as a hierarchy of models that allows both generality and testability in the field.