Community Ecology: An Experimentalist's Description. - MODERN - Review - book review

Morin, Peter J 1999 Community ecology Blackwell Science, Maiden, Massachusetts. viii + 424 P $4595 ISBN: 0-86542-350-4

This textbook was make knowned from the course that Morin has taught for 15 years to graduate scholars at Rutgers University. The preface states that it should be useful to upper-level undergraduates and graduate pupils It will be useful to professionals too; it is a solid body with up-to-date treatment. It overlays no new ground, but draws a great deal of material together in one contortion in such a way that any interested individual can save a lot of time in finding one as well as the other useful references and at least individual synthesis of many important ideas. I will draw upon the text in this way repeatedly in the several ecology courses that I teach.

The book's intent is to serve as a body for a course in community ecology and it will labor for admirably. Any serious student attempting to wend his way from one side the complexities of this rather difficult make subordinate will find excellent assistance. Any professor teaching a community ecology course will find that the true copy provides much organizational help and direction.

The contented is much the same as has been included in similarly titled tomes for the past sum of two units decades and that I remember studying beneath that rubric as an undergraduate in the 1960 (but plenteous updated, of course). However, probably because Morin has written the volume Out of experience and as a body he has provided a heavy dose of population ecology not usually considered to be a part of community ecology in several lock opener places, to make sure that all the intended pupil audience is ready to explore the community ecology topics. Professors commonly engage this quite useful device. Having this material in individual volume will facilitate that practice for professor and pupil alike.

The main true copy is in three parts: (I) "Communities: basic patterns and elementary processes"; (II) "Factors influencing interactions among species"; and (III) "Large-scale, integrative community phenomena." Slightly more than 60% of the true copy is in Part I, which introduces communities, treats the interactions among populations that Morin considers central to any legitimate general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of community (competition, predation, fare webs, mutualism, and indirect effects) and describes the function and contribution of observations, designs and experiments (laboratory and field) to in every one's mouth understandings of communities. Part II (just below 20% of the text) examines temporal patterns in assemblages (but not succession), habitat selection, and spatial dynamics (including recruitment and island biogeography). Part III (slightly les than 20%) analyses species diversity, succession, and applications of community ecology to resource management. Morin's treatment and inclusion of material are appropriate and consistent with cu rrent understandings of the field.

I lay the foundation of the organization laid out in the table of contenteds (summarized above) and the organization within parts and chapters to be of the best Subjects are treated in an appropriate order, and are fitly integrated with each other in the way that as to allow the naive or the sophisticated reader to readily relate material from single section with material from another. The 15-page index is real complete, with entries that fit the two student's and practitioner's expectations. I asked several pupils to find information on topics they chose and all rest the material they wanted. Morin's writing is clear, concise, and to the point, notwithstanding includes sufficient elaboration to be convincing. The placement of the material upon stability analysis in an appendix as single example of a useful means in community ecology is appropriate, on the other hand I would have liked to have seen additional meanss covered similarly. This is not a major weakness of the work as a text, since many meanss manuals in ecology are available, and since graduate learners a re usually expected to lay open methods or to adapt them from original sources for any laboratory work carried on the outside as part of a course.

The work is typical of most novel texts for advanced courses, with adequate illustrations (most drawn from published sources, a hardly any original to illustrate concepts or points) emphasizing science rather than being included as pedagogical devices. The illustrations effectively communicate through complementing the text.

The treatment of community ecology will not surprise many, and the opening statement ("Ecology is the science of communities," quot from Victor Shelford) throw backs Morin's lifelong work and passion in this area, probably without bias against other subdisciplines in ecology He is simply emphasizing that ecology involves interactions, and that no natural unit without interactions is full He recognizes that others include ecosystem function as a part of community ecology on the contrary excludes it himself from this treatment. I be combined considering that the interactions among populations that are treated here as being a part of community ecology are explored with true different methods from the chemical approaches of the ecosystem ecologist. However, I would also disagree with the opening statement, Shelford's well deserv recognition as a founding parent of novel ecology notwithstanding. The topics explored in this volume are part of a continuum of environmental interaction ranging from by what mode the individual copes wi th physical features upon a physiological scale, to manifold chemical and physical processes upon a global scale. This is a quibble rather than a significant criticism.