Biodiversity Dynamics

How will patterns of human interaction with the earth's eco-system impact on biodiversity loss over the long term--not in the next ten or even fifty years, but on the vast temporal scale be dealt with by earth scientists?

The contributors to "Biodiversity Dynamics" bring together the cutting-edge findings of a number of different fields that have traditionally had little cross-over: data from population biology, community ecology, comparative biology, and paleontology are all presented. Editor Michael L. McKinney begins the book with an overview of the concept of biodiversity dynamics, explaining why turnover needs to be addressed in terms of all scales of time and space and why it is so important to look at speciation and extinction together, as interdependent processes.

"Biodiversity Dynamics" is divided into two parts, the first exploring turnover at the species level and the second investigating larger-scale community and ecosystem turnover. Contributors in part 1 write on such topics as the relationship of geographic range to diversification and extinction rates, the phylogenetic constraints on evolution of various traits, and the evolution of complexity. In part 2, papers focus on such subjects as how fine- and course-scale observation of ecosystems often yield widely disparate results, the question of diversity equilibrium over the ages, and how evolutionary turnover is crucial to understanding the origins of biodiversity.

Where paleontologists and ecologists have long had divergent perspectives, "Biodiversity Dynamics" seeks a middle ground, finding ways for both scientific communities to work together to comprehend the great biodiversity of the earth and how topreserve it for future generations.