Inside this Book Back of Book Info Table of Contents Series SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Pub. Date December 2005 Publisher Oxford University Press Order Info 0-195-18816-0 $64.50 (cloth)

Complex networks of species interactions, such as the consumer-resource relationships characterized by food webs, are ubiquitous in nature. Interactions among species at multiple trophic levels underlie the flow of energy and biomass in ecosystems and mediate the response of species to natural and anthropogenic pertubations such as habitat loss and climate change. Understanding the ecology and mathematics of the structure and dynamics of ecological networks is central to understanding the stability of ecosystems in terms of persistence, resilience, and robustness. While scientists from disciplines including ecology and and physics have begun to describe the broad-scale structure of complex ecological networks, few biologically plausible models have been able to simulate the persistent nonlinear dynamics of such networks.

Mercedes Pascual, Jennifer Dunne, and the distinguished contributors to this volume explore the boundaries of what is know of the relationship between structures and dynamics in large ecological networks. Structure is shown both to influence dynamics and to be dynamic, changing in time and space as the result of assembly processes at evolutionary and ecological time scales and plasticity in species interactions.

This volume describes the history and recent advances in ecological network structure research, explores the relationship between structure and dynamics, considers the role of network evolution and adaptation, highlights the importance of an ecological network perspective for conservation,and defines directions for future developments in this field. Going beyond a traditional focus on food webs, this volume considers other types of interactions including pollination and parasitism, and incorporates perspectives from other research areas such as artificial life. The emerging topics discussed in this volume are likely to shape much important research over the next decade in both ecology and the broader arena of network science.

About the Editors

Jennifer A. Dunne is an ecologist with interests in theory, comparative analysis, and informatics, especially regarding ecological networks, biodiversity, paleoecology, and climate change. She is Assistant Director for the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab, a Visiting Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Research Associate at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.

Mercedes Pascual is a theoretical ecologist interested in the nonlinear dynamics of ecological systems and their response to environmental change, and in the scaling and simplification of mathematical models for large nonlinear systems across spatial and organizational scales. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. She is also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at UM and is an external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.