Forest trees cover 30% of the earth's land surface, providing renewable fuel, wood, timber, shelter, fruits, leaves, bark, roots, and are source of medicinal products in addition to benefits such as carbon sequestration, water shed protection, and habitat for 1/3 of terrestrial species. However, the genetic analysis and breeding of trees has lagged behind that of crop plants. Therefore, systematic conservation, sustainable improvement and pragmatic utilization of trees are global priorities. This book provides comprehensive and up to date information about tree characterization, biological understanding, and improvement through biotechnological and molecular tools.

In recent years researchers have discovered that bats play key roles in many ecosystems as insect predators, seed dispersers, and pollinators. Bats also display astonishing ecological and evolutionary diversity and serve as important models for studies of a wide variety of topics, including food webs, biogeography, and emerging diseases. In "Bat Ecology," world-renowned bat scholars present an up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative review of this ongoing research.
The first part of the book covers the life history and behavioral ecology of bats, from migration to sperm competition and natural selection. The next section focuses on functional ecology, including ecomorphology, feeding, and physiology. In the third section, contributors explore macroecological issues such as the evolution of ecological diversity, range size, and infectious diseases (including rabies) in bats. A final chapter discusses conservation challenges facing these fascinating flying mammals.
"Bat Ecology" is the most comprehensive state-of-the-field collection for scientists and researchers.
Contributors:
John D. Altringham, Robert M. R. Barclay, Tenley M. Conway, Elizabeth R. Dumont, Peggy Eby, Abigail C. Entwistle, Theodore H. Fleming, Patricia W. Freeman, Lawrence D. Harder, Gareth Jones, Linda F. Lumsden, Gary F. McCracken, Sharon L. Messenger, Bruce D. Patterson, Paul A. Racey, Jens Rydell, Charles E. Rupprecht, Nancy B. Simmons, Jean S. Smith, John R. Speakman, Richard D. Stevens, Elizabeth F. Stockwell, Sharon M. Swartz, Donald W. Thomas, Otto von Helversen, Gerald S. Wilkinson, Michael R. Willig, York Winter

Urban Evolutionary Biology fills an important knowledge gap on wild organismal evolution in the urban environment, whilst offering a novel exploration of the fast-growing new field of evolutionary research. The growing rate of urbanization and the maturation of urban study systems worldwide means interest in the urban environment as an agent of evolutionary change is rapidly increasing. We are presently witnessing the emergence of a new field of research in evolutionary biology. Despite its rapid global expansion, the urban environment has until now been a largely neglected study site among evolutionary biologists. With its conspicuously altered ecological dynamics, it stands in stark contrast to the natural environments traditionally used as cornerstones for evolutionary ecology research. Urbanization can offer a great range of new opportunities to test for rapid evolutionary processes as a consequence of human activity, both because of replicate contexts for hypothesis testing, but also because cities are characterized by an array of easily quantifiable environmental axes of variation and thus testable agents of selection. Thanks to a wide possible breadth of inference (in terms of taxa) that may be studied, and a great variety of analytical methods, urban evolution has the potential to stand at a fascinating multi-disciplinary crossroad, enriching the field of evolutionary biology with emergent yet incredibly potent new research themes where the urban habitat is key. Urban Evolutionary Biology is an advanced textbook suitable for graduate level students as well as professional researchers studying the genetics, evolutionary biology, and ecology of urban environments. It is also highly relevant to urban ecologists and urban wildlife practitioners.

Fish have evolved to colonise almost every type of aquatic habitat and today they are a hugely diverse group of over 25,000 species. The evolution of this great diversity of species has resulted in a myriad of solutions to the demands posed by the aquatic environment.
Ecological and Environmental Physiology of Fish presents a current and comprehensive overview of fish physiology to demonstrate how living fish function in their environment. As with other books in the Series, the emphasis is on the unique physiological characteristics of the fish, but with applications to questions of broad relevance in physiological ecology. A preliminary chapter introduces the aquatic environment and gives a general description of fish biology, evolution, and taxonomy. Subsequent sections discuss the particular problems of living in water, life in extreme environments, techniques for studying fish ecophysiology, and future research directions.

The marmosets and callimicos are diminutive monkeys from the Amazon basin and Atlantic Coastal Forest of South America. The marmosets are the smallest anthropoid primates in the world, ranging in size from approximately 100 to 350 g (Hershkovitz 1977; Soini 1988; Ford and Davis 1992; Araujo et al. 2000); calli- cos are not much bigger, at around 350-540 g (Ford and Davis 1992; Encarnacion and Heymann 1998; Garber and Leigh 2001). Overwhelming genetic evidence, from both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, now indicates that these taxa represent a unified clade within the callitrichid radiation of New World monkeys, a finding that was unthinkable to all but a few geneticists a decade ago (see review in Cortes- Ortiz, this volume Chap. 2). With increasing evidence that the earliest anthropoids were themselves small bodied (under the 0. 8-1 kg threshold that marks all other living anthropoids; see Ross and Kay 2004), the ecology, behavior, reproductive stresses, and anatomical adaptations of the marmosets and callimicos provide the best living models with which to assess the types of adaptations that may have characterized early anthropoids. When Anthony Rylands' Marmosets and Tamarins: Systematics, Behaviour and Ecology was published in 1993, contributions focused almost entirely on tamarins due to the scarcity of data on marmoset behavior and the almost total lack of kno- edge about the enigmatic callimicos. Fortunately, this has changed (see Fig. 1).

In recent years it has become increasingly clear that chemical interactions play a fundamental role in aquatic habitats and have far-reaching evolutionary and ecological consequences. A plethora of studies have shown that aquatic organisms from most taxa and functional groups respond to minute concentrations of chemical substances released by other organisms. However, our knowledge of this "chemical network" is still negligible. Chemical interactions can be divided into two larger sub-areas based on the function of the chemical substance. First, there are interactions where chemical substances are toxic to other organisms and are used as a defence against consumers (including both herbivores and predators) or a weapon against competitors (allelopathy). Second, chemical substances may be used as a source for information of the environment; for example: how can I find the optimal habitat, the best food, the nicest partner, and avoid being eaten? Aquatic organisms are able to detect and respond to extremely low concentrations of chemical cues to answer all these questions. The book aims at connecting these intriguing chemical interactions with traditional knowledge of organism interactions. Chemical Ecology of Aquatic Systems covers a wide range of studies, both plant and animal, from different geographic regions and habitats - pelagic as well as benthic. Most of the chemical interactions are similar in freshwater and marine habitats and this book therefore strives at integrating work on both systems.

Global wetlands exhibit significant differences in both hydrology and species composition and range from moss-dominated arctic peatlands to seasonally-flooded tropical floodplains. They are increasingly recognized for the important services that they provide to both the environment and human society such as wildlife and fish production, nutrient filtering, and carbon sequestration. A combination of low oxygen levels and dense plant canopies present particular challenges for organisms living in this aquatic habitat. This concise textbook discusses the universal environmental and biological features of wetland habitats, with an emphasis on wetland plants and animals and their adaptations. It also describes the functional features of wetlands - primary production, litter decomposition, food webs, and nutrient cycling - and their significance locally and globally. The future of wetlands is examined, including the potential threats of global climate change and invasive species, as well as their restoration and creation. This new edition maintains the structure and style of the first, but is fully updated throughout with new chapters on invasive species, restoration/creation, global climate change, and the value of wetlands.

This book provides the first global synthesis of the biology of disturbed habitats and offers readers both the conceptual underpinnings and practical advice required to comprehend and address the unprecedented environmental challenges facing humans. Every habitat on earth has been impacted by natural disturbances such as volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, fires, floods, and droughts. Humans have contributed many additional disturbances such as mining, urbanization, forestry, agriculture, fishing, and recreation. These anthropogenic disturbances modify and often exacerbate the effects of the natural disturbances. Together, they result in the abrupt loss of biomass or ecosystem structure and function to create denuded surfaces where novel mixtures of native and non-native microbes, plants, and animals establish, grow, and die. The Biology of Disturbed Habitats examines both natural and anthropogenic disturbances in aquatic and terrestrial habitats. It explores how nutrients and productivity are altered in the disturbed habitats, the effects of disturbance on biodiversity, and the spatial and temporal dynamics of organisms that colonize disturbed habitats. This book also addresses how to manage disturbances through appropriate conservation and restoration measures, and discusses how climate change and overpopulation now represent the most challenging disturbances at a global scale.

In nature there exist three main types of biotic interactions between individuals of different species: competition, predation, and mutualism. All three exert powerful selection pressures, and all three shape communities. However, the question of how important interspecific competition in nature really is remains controversial and unresolved. This book provides a critical and exhaustive review of the topic. Although the examples are limited mostly to birds (interspecific competition and community structure have been exhaustively studied in this animal group, and a lot of experimental data are available), the conclusions reached have a far broader relevance to population ecologists in general. The book reasons that the coexistence of species is the result of both past and presently on-going interspecific competition. Furthermore, understanding the importance of interspecific competition in natural systems will be increasingly important when modelling the effects of climate change on populations.

The genomics revolution has expanded from its origins in molecular biology to impact upon every discipline in the life sciences, including ecology. Several lines of ecological research can now be profitably addressed using genomics technology, including issues of nutrient cycling, population structure, life-history variation, trophic interaction, stress responses, and adaptation to environmental change. This new edition addresses a series of fundamental ecological questions: the relationship between community structure and ecological function in ecosystems; how variation in life-history patterns among species can be explained from interaction between the genome and the environment; the molecular responses to changing and toxic environmental conditions; adaptive phenotypes and their relationship to genetic variation. Each of these questions is evaluated in the light of recent advances in genomics research, paying particular attention to data obtained from sequencing and screening of environmental genomes (metagenomics), microarray-based transcription profiling, gene expression directed by signal-transduction pathways, and the analysis of genomic polymorphisms. The chapters covering these key areas are preceded by discussions of genomics methodology (including an overview of next-generation sequencing technologies) and comparative genomics, and the book concludes with a chapter on integrative approaches such as ecological control analysis. The authors also provide a comparative survey of the properties of genomes (genome size, gene families, synteny, and polymorphism) for prokaryotes as well as the main eukaryotic models. An Introduction to Ecological Genomics incorporates a balance of plant, animal, and microbial examples, and continues to define the new and exciting field of ecological genomics.

Animals as geomorphic agents have primarily been considered "curiosities" in the literature of geomorphology, whose spatial and quantitative influences have been seen as both limited and minor. Zoogeomorphology: Animals as Geomorphic Agents examines the distinct geomorphic influences of invertebrates, ectothermic vertebrates, birds, and mammals, and demonstrates the importance of animals as landscape sculptors. Specific processes associated with the diversity of animal influences in geomorphology are examined, including burrowing and denning, nesting, lithophagy and geophagy, wallowing and trampling, food caching, excavating for food, and dam building by beavers. Particular emphasis is placed on terrestrial animals, although aquatic animals are also discussed where appropriate. This book, which is the only one available wholly devoted to this topic, will interest graduate students and professional research workers in geomorphology, ecology, environmental science, physical geography, and geology.

Pillars of Evolution provides a fresh and provocative perspective on adaptive evolution. Readers new to the study of evolution will find a refreshing new insight that establishes evolutionary biology as a rigorous and predictive science, whilst practicing biologists will discover a provocative book that challenges traditional approaches.
The book begins by leading readers through the mechanics of heredity, reproduction, movement, survival, and development. With that framework in place, it then explores the numerous ways that traits emerge from the interactions between genetics, development, and the environment. The key message is that adaptive changes in traits (and their underlying allelic frequencies) evolve through the traits' functions and their connection with fitness. The complex mappings from genes-to-traits-to-fitness are characterized in the structure of evolution. A single "structure matrix" describes why individuals vary in the values of adaptive traits, their ability to perform the function of those traits, and in the fitness they accrue. Fitness depends on how organisms interact with and perceive their environment in time and space. These relationships are made explicit in spatial, temporal, and organizational scale that also sets the stage for the crucially important role that ecology always plays in evolution. The ecological hallmarks of density- and frequency-dependent interactions allow the authors to explore new and exciting insights into evolution's dynamics. The theories and principles are then brought together in a final synthesis on adaptation.
The book's unique approach unites genetic, development, and environmental influences into a single comprehensive treatment of the eco-evolutionary process.

Origins of Biodiversity is a unique introduction to the fields of macroevolution and macroecology, which explores the evolution and distribution of biodiversity across time, space and lineages. Using an enquiry-led framework to encourage active learning and critical thinking, each chapter is based around a case-study to explore concepts and research methods from contemporary macroevolution and macroecology. The book focuses on the process of science as much as the biology itself, to help students acquire the research skills and intellectual tools they need to understand and investigate the biological world around them. In particular, the emphasis on hypothesis testing encourages students to develop and test their own ideas. This text builds upon the foundations offered in most general introductory evolutionary biology courses to introduce an exciting range of ideas and research tools for investigating patterns of biodiversity.

For the first time, this book tells the Wytham story in a way that is accessible to both scientist and general reader alike. It provides a fascinating overview of what the Woods are like, their history, composition (both plant and animal), and how their wildlife has changed over time.
This iconic location has been the subject of a series of continuous ecological research programs dating back to the 1920s, a level of continuity of research effort that is extremely rare. Hence there is a strong emphasis on the significance of the scientific research that has been done there and how this has contributed to ecological thinking elsewhere.

Until about 13,000 years ago, Europe and North America were home to a menagerie of massive mammals. Mammoths, camels, and lions walked the ground that has become our cities and streets. Then, just as the first humans reached the Americas, these Ice Age giants vanished forever. In Once and Future Giants, science writer Sharon Levy digs through the evidence surrounding Pleistocene large animal ("megafauna") extinction events worldwide, showing that understanding this history-and our part in it-is crucial for protecting the elephants, polar bears, and other great creatures at risk today. These surviving relatives of the Ice Age beasts now face an intensified replay of that great die-off, as our species usurps the planet's last wild places while driving a warming trend more extreme than any in mammalian history. Inspired by a passion for the lost Pleistocene giants, some scientists advocate bringing wolves back to Scotland, and elephants to America's Great Plains as stand-ins for their extinct native brethren. By reintroducing big browsers and carnivores to colder climes, they argue, we could rescue some of the planet's most endangered animals while restoring healthy prairie ecosystems. Critics, including biologists enmeshed in the struggle to restore native species see the proposal as a dangerous distraction from more realistic and legitimate conservation efforts. Deftly navigating competing theories and emerging evidence, Once and Future Giants examines the extent of human influence on megafauna extinctions past and present, and explores innovative conservation efforts around the globe. The key to modern-day conservation, Levy suggests, may lie fossilized right under our feet.

Communication is an essential factor underpinning the interactions between species and the structure of their communities. Plant-animal interactions are particularly diverse due to the complex nature of their mutualistic and antagonistic relationships. However the evolution of communication and the underlying mechanisms responsible remain poorly understood.
Plant-Animal Communication is a timely summary of the latest research and ideas on the ecological and evolutionary foundations of communication between plants and animals, including discussions of fundamental concepts such as deception, reliability, and camouflage. It introduces how the sensory world of animals shapes the various modes of communication employed, laying out the basics of vision, scent, acoustic, and gustatory communication. Subsequent chapters discuss how plants communicate in these sensory modes to attract animals to facilitate seed dispersal, pollination, and carnivory, and how they communicate to defend themselves against herbivores. Potential avenues for productive theoretical and empirical research are clearly identified, and suggestions for novel empirical approaches to the study of communication in general are outlined.

Despite the wealth of natural historical research conducted on migration over decades, there is still a dearth of hypothesis-driven studies that fully integrate theory and empirical analyses to understand the causes and consequences of migration, and a taxonomic bias towards birds in much migration research. This book takes a comparative, integrated view of animal migration, linking evolution with ecology and management, theory with empirical research, and embracing all the major migratory taxa (including human pastoralists). The scope extends beyond the target organism to consider the ecosystem-level dynamics of migration. The emphasis is on exciting new research avenues that are now opening up, whether due to advances in our understanding of migration as a biological phenomenon or through the availability of a range of new technologies.
Broad themes that emerge include integrating migration into the broad spectrum of movement behavior, the need for a comparative and cross-taxonomic approach that considers migration at a range of temporal and spatial scales, and examination of the key roles of resource uncertainty and spatial heterogeneity in driving migratory behavior. The book identifies the potential for new tools to revolutionize the study of migration, including satellite-tracking technology, genomics, and modeling - all of which are linked to increasing computing power. We are now on the verge of a breakthrough in migration research, which is crucial given the multiple threats that face the conservation of migration as a phenomenon, including climate change.

Living things are organized in a hierarchy of levels. Genes group together in cells, cells group together in organisms, and organisms group together in societies. Even different species form mutualistic partnerships. Throughout the history of life, previously independent units have formed groups that, in time, have come to resemble individuals in their own right. Evolutionary biologists term such events "the major transitions." The process common to them all is social evolution. Each transition occurs only if natural selection favors one unit joining with another in a new kind of group.
This book presents a fresh synthesis of the principles of social evolution that underlie the major transitions, explaining how the basic theory underpinning social evolution - inclusive fitness theory - is central to understanding each event. The book defines the key stages in a major transition, then highlights the shared principles operating at each stage across the transitions as a whole. It addresses in new ways the question of how, once they have arisen, organisms and societies become more individualistic.

Living things are organized in a hierarchy of levels. Genes group together in cells, cells group together in organisms, and organisms group together in societies. Even different species form mutualistic partnerships. Throughout the history of life, previously independent units have formed groups that, in time, have come to resemble individuals in their own right. Evolutionary biologists term such events "the major transitions." The process common to them all is social evolution. Each transition occurs only if natural selection favors one unit joining with another in a new kind of group.
This book presents a fresh synthesis of the principles of social evolution that underlie the major transitions, explaining how the basic theory underpinning social evolution - inclusive fitness theory - is central to understanding each event. The book defines the key stages in a major transition, then highlights the shared principles operating at each stage across the transitions as a whole. It addresses in new ways the question of how, once they have arisen, organisms and societies become more individualistic.

Introducing Biological Energetics is a novel, interdisciplinary text that presents biological understanding in terms of general underlying principles, treating energy as the overarching theme and emphasizing the all-pervading influence of energy transformation in every process, both living and non-living. Key processes and concepts are explained in turn, culminating in a description of the overall functioning and regulation of a living cell. The book rounds off the story of life with a brief account of the endosymbiotic origins of eukaryotic cells, the development of multicellularity, and the emergence of modern plants and animals.
Multidisciplinary research in science is becoming commonplace. However, as traditional boundaries start to break down, researchers are increasingly aware of the deficiencies in their knowledge of related disciplines. Introducing Biological Energetics redresses the reciprocal imbalance in the knowledge levels of physical and biological scientists in particular. Its style of presentation and depth of treatment has been carefully designed to unite these two readerships.

Primary sexual traits, those structures and processes directly involved in reproduction, are some of the most diverse, specialized, and bizarre in the animal kingdom. Moreover, reproductive traits are often species-specific, suggesting that they evolved very rapidly. This diversity, long the province of taxonomists, has recently attracted broader interest from evolutionary biologists, especially those interested in sexual selection and the evolution of reproductive strategies.
Primary sexual characters were long assumed to be the product of natural selection, exclusively. A recent alternative suggests that sexual selection explains much of the diversity of "primary" sexual characters. A third approach to the evolution of reproductive interactions after copulation or insemination has been to consider the process one of sexual conflict. That is, the reproductive processes of a species may reflect, as does the mating system, evolution acting on males and on females, but in different directions.
In this volume, authors explore a wide variety of primary sexual characters and selective pressures that have shaped them, from natural selection for offspring survival to species-isolating mechanisms, sperm competition, cryptic female choice and sexual arms races. Exploring diverse reproductive adaptations from a theoretical and practical perspective, The Evolution of Primary Sexual Characters will provide an unparalleled overview of sexual diversity in many taxa and an introduction to the issues in sexual selection that are changing our view of sexual processes.

A two-volume set made up of 'Biology and Conservation of Wild Canids' and 'Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids'. These advanced textbooks bring together a unique network of the world's most respected and knowledgeable experts to provide a review of the biology and conservation of these families, and provide detailed case-studies from species investigations worldwide.

This auto-translation book overviews the fish population and its research methods, help readers in understanding the concept of fish population and population identification. It divides into seven chapters according to the characteristics of the subject and the development results. Based on a systematic introduction to the basic concepts and research contents of the biology of fishery resources, the book focuses on the introduction of fish populations and research methods, life history division and early development identification, age identification and growth research, the division of sexual maturity, the determination of reproductive habits and fecundity, feeding characteristics and research methods of fish, and the mechanism of fish colony and migration. Through the study of this course, we can master the basic theory and methods of fish biology research and lay a solid foundation for future researches on fishery resources. This book can be used as a reference book for undergraduates and postgraduates who study fishery resources, as well as for those who are engaged in fishery and marine research. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

As sequel to Aquatic Animal Nutrition - A Mechanistic Perspective from Individuals to Generations, the present treatise on organic macro- and micronutrients continues the unique cross fertilization of aquatic ecology/ecophysiology and aquaculture. This treatise considers proteins and their constituents, carbohydrates from mono- to polysaccharides, fatty acids from free acids to fat, and waxes. It becomes obvious that these organic nutrients are more than only simple fuel for the metabolism of animals; rather, their constituents have messenger and controlling function for the actual consuming individual and even for succeeding generations. This aspect will become particularly clear by putting the organisms under consideration back into their ecosystem with their interrelationships and interdependencies. Furthermore, micronutrients, such as vitamins and nucleotides as well as exogenous enzymes, are in the focus of this volume with known and still-to-be-discovered controlling physiological and biomolecular functions. Aquatic Animal Nutrition - Organic Macro and Micro Nutrients addresses se veral gaps in nutritional research and practice. One major gap is the lack of com mon research standards and protocols for nutritional studies so that virtually incomparable approaches have to be compared. This applies also to the studied animals, since most approaches disregard intraspecific variabilities and the existence of epimutations in farmed individuals. Furthermore, recalling the Mechanistic Perspective from Individuals to Generations, dietary benefits and deficiencies have effects on succeeding generations. In most studies, this long-term and sustainable aspect is overruled by pure short-term production aspects. By comparing nutritional behavior and success of fishes and invertebrates, Aqua tic Animal Nutrition points out different metabolic pathways in these animal groups and discusses how, for instance, fishes would benefit when having some successful metabolic pathway of invertebrates. Application of novel ge ne tic techniques will help turn this vision into reality. However, a widely missing link in the current nutritional research is epigenetics regarding transgenerational heritages of acquired morphological and physiological properties. To in crease public acceptance, nutritional optimization of farmed animals based on this mechanism, rather than genetical engineering, appears promising.