Food webs hold a central place in ecology. They describe which organisms feed on which others in natural habitats. This book describes recently discovered empirical regularities in real food webs: it proposes a novel theory unifying many of these regularities, as well as extensive empirical data. After a general introduction, reviewing the empirical and theoretical discoveries about food webs, the second portion of the book shows that community food webs obey several striking phenomenological regularities. Some of these unify, regardless of habitat. Others differentiate, showing that habitat significantly influences structure. The third portion of the book presents a theoretical analysis of some of the unifying empirical regularities. The fourth portion of the book presents 13 community food webs. Collected from scattered sources and carefully edited, they are the empirical basis for the results in the volume. The largest available set of data on community food webs provides a valuable foundation for future studies of community food webs. The book is intended for graduate students, teachers and researchers primarily in ecology. The theoretical portions of the book provide materials useful to teachers of applied combinatorics, in particular, random graphs. Researchers in random graphs will find here unsolved mathematical problems.

Community Food Webs: Data and Theory

Science & Math

Cohen, Joel E.

Newman, Charles M.

Briand, Frédéric

Mathematics

Springer, Verlag

Examines the problem of the unprecedented rise in the world's population, showing how overpopulation will force future generations to make difficult choices among the competing values of economic development, environmental quality, and procreative freedom.

How Many People Can the Earth Support?

Business & Money

Economics

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

A compelling new analysis of world population issues and what the numbers tell us. . . . With the world population now at 5.7 billion, and increasing by about 90 million per year, we have clearly entered a zone where we can see, and may well encounter, limits on the human carrying capacity of the Earth. In this penetrating analysis of one of the most crucial questions of our time, a leading scholar in the field reviews the history of world population growth and appraises what can be known about its future.

W.W.Norton&Company

Gathers jokes and anecdotes about academia, scientists, teaching professors, scientific reputations, academic publishing, women scientists, and popular science

Absolute Zero Gravity: Science Jokes, Quotes and Anecdotes

Humor & Entertainment

Devine, Betsy

Humor

Fireside

A very good hardcover copy. Bit of edge fading. Tight binding. Clean, unmarked pages. Good jacket in removable mylar; price clipped; some scuffing with faded spine. NOT ex-library. Indexed. 175pg. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilogram. Category: Social Sciences; Inventory No: 019511.

Casual Groups Of Monkeys And Men

Literature & Fiction

Harvard University Press

Casual Groups of Monkeys and Men: Stochastic Models of Elemental Social Systems

Management & Leadership

Food Webs and Niche Space (Monographs in Population Biology, 11)

What is the minimum dimension of a niche space necessary to represent the overlaps among observed niches? This book presents a new technique for obtaining a partial answer to this elementary question about niche space. The author bases his technique on a relation between the combinatorial structure of food webs and the mathematical theory of interval graphs.
 Professor Cohen collects more than thirty food webs from the ecological literature and analyzes their statistical and combinatorial properties in detail. As a result, he is able to generalize: within habitats of a certain limited physical and temporal heterogeneity, the overlaps among niches, along their trophic (feeding) dimensions, can be represented in a one-dimensional niche space far more often than would be expected by chance alone and perhaps always. This compatibility has not previously been noticed. It indicates that real food webs fall in a small subset of the mathematically possible food webs.
 Professor Cohen discusses other apparently new features of real food webs, including the constant ratio of the number of kinds of prey to the number of kinds of predators in food webs that describe a community. In conclusion he discusses possible extensions and limitations of his results and suggests directions for future research.

Stephens, David W.

Biological Sciences

Princeton University Press

What is the minimum dimension of a niche space necessary to represent the overlaps among observed niches? This book presents a new technique for obtaining a partial answer to this elementary question about niche space. The author bases his technique on a relation between the combinatorial structure of food webs and the mathematical theory of interval graphs. Professor Cohen collects more than thirty food webs from the ecological literature and analyzes their statistical and combinatorial properties in detail. As a result, he is able to generalize: within habitats of a certain limited physical and temporal heterogeneity, the overlaps among niches, along their trophic (feeding) dimensions, can be represented in a one-dimensional niche space far more often than would be expected by chance alone and perhaps always. This compatibility has not previously been noticed. It indicates that real food webs fall in a small subset of the mathematically possible food webs. Professor Cohen discusses other apparently new features of real food webs, including the constant ratio of the number of kinds of prey to the number of kinds of predators in food webs that describe a community. In conclusion he discusses possible extensions and limitations of his results and suggests directions for future research.

The focus of this work is on generalizing the notion of variation in a set of numbers to variation in a set of probability distributions. The authors collect some known ways of comparing stochastic matrices in the context of information theory, statistics, economics, and population sciences. They then generalize these comparisons, introduce new comparisons, and establish the relations of implication or equivalence among sixteen of these comparisons. Some of the possible implications among these comparisons remain open questions. The results in this book establish a new field of investigation for both mathematicians and scientific users interested in the variations among multiple probability distributions. A great strength of this text is the resulting connections among ideas from diverse fields - mathematics, statistics, economics, and population biology. In providing this array of new tools and concepts, the work will appeal to the practitioner. At the same time, it will serve as an excellent resource for self-study or for a graduate seminar course, as well as a stimulus to further research.

Comparisons of Stochastic Matrices with Applications in Information Theory, Statistics, Economics and Population Sciences

Computers & Technology

Kemperman, J. H. B.

Zbăganu, Gheorghe

Computer Science

Birkhauser

Forecasting Product Liability Claims: Epidemiology and Modeling in the Manville Asbestos Case (Statistics for Biology and Health)

This selection of papers encompasses recent methodological advances in several important areas, such as multivariate failure time data and interval censored data, as well as innovative applications of the existing theory and methods. Using a rigorous account of statistical forecasting efforts that led to the successful resolution of the John-Manville asbestos litigation, the models in this volume can be adapted to forecast industry-wide asbestos liability. More generally, because the models are not overly dependent on the U.S. legal system and the role of asbestos, this volume will be of interest in other product liability cases, as well as similar forecasting situations for a range of insurable or compensational events. Throughout the text, the emphasis is on the iterative nature of model building and the uncertainty generated by lack of complete knowledge of the injury process. This uncertainty is balanced against the court's need for a definitive settlement, and how these opposing principles can be reconciled. A valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in the field of survival analysis.

Stallard, Eric

Manton, Kenneth G.

Springer

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