A Primer of Ecology

This volume presents a concise but detailed exposition of the most common mathematical models in population and community ecology. It is intended to demystify ecological models and the mathematics behind them by deriving the models from first principles. The book may be used as a self-teaching tutorial by students, as a primary textbook, or as a supplemental text to a general ecology textbook. The Primer explains in detail basic concepts of exponential and logistic population growth, age structured demography, metapopulation dynamics, competition, predation, island biogeography, and, in a chapter new to this edition, succession. Each chapter is graded from simple material that is appropriate for beginning undergraduates to advanced material, which is suited for upper division undergraduates and beginning graduate students. Advanced topics include environmental andemographic stochasticity, discrete population growth and chaos, stage structured demography, intraguild predation, nonlinear predator prey isoclines, and passive sampling.