Presenting new approaches to studying food webs, this book uses practical management and policy examples to demonstrate the theory behind ecosystem management decisions and the broader issue of sustainability. All the information that readers need to use food web analyses as a tool for understanding and quantifying transition processes is provided. Advancing the idea of food webs as complex adaptive systems, readers are challenged to rethink how changes in environmental conditions affect these systems. Beginning with the current state of thinking about community organisation, complexity and stability, the book moves on to focus on the traits of organisms, the adaptive nature of communities and their impacts on ecosystem function. The final section of the book addresses the applications to management and sustainability. By helping to understand the complexities of multispecies networks, this book provides insights into the evolution of organisms and the fate of ecosystems in a changing world.

Dynamic Food Webs challenges us to rethink what factors may determine ecological and evolutionary pathways of food web development. It touches upon the intriguing idea that trophic interactions drive patterns and dynamics at different levels of biological organization: dynamics in species composition, dynamics in population life-history parameters and abundances, and dynamics in individual growth, size and behavior. These dynamics are shown to be strongly interrelated governing food web structure and stability and the role of populations and communities play in ecosystem functioning.
Dyanmic Food Webs not only offers over 100 illustrations, but also contains 8 riveting sections devoted to an understanding of how to manage the effects of environmental change, the protection of biological diversity and the sustainable use of natural resources.
Dyanmic Food Webs is a volume in the "Theoretical Ecology" series.
* Relates dynamics on different levels of biological organization: individuals, populations, and communities
* Deals with empirical and theoretical approaches
* Discusses the role of community food webs in ecosystem functioning
* Proposes methods to assess the effects of environmental change on the structure of biological communities and ecosystem functioning
* Offers an analyses of the relationship between complexity and stability in food webs