"With vivid, prismatic photos, zoologist Piper offers encounters with dozens of improbable-looking but beautiful organisms you've never heard of." --Entertainment Weekly

This textbook provides the first overview of plant-animal interactions for twenty years focused on the needs of students and professors. It discusses a range of topics from the basic structures of plant-animal interactions to their evolutionary implications in producing and maintaining biodiversity. It also highlights innovative aspects of plant-animal interactions that can represent highly productive research avenues, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in a future career in ecology. Written by leading experts, and employing a variety of didactic tools, the book is useful for students and teachers involved in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses addressing areas such as herbivory, trophic relationships, plant defense, pollination and biodiversity.

India being one of the top twelve mega biodiversity countries in the world, the increasing rate of erosion of biodiversity has been causing great concern. Because of socio-economic changes, biological diversity has to come to occupying the central stage as it holds `key to the maintenance of the world'. Biodiversity is a multifactered science bringing the ecologist and environmentalist together resulting in an interdisciplinary subject. Issues like ecosystem dynamics, global changes and impact of the loss of biodiversity at various level such as local, national and global levels have become important. As a result of the loss of increasingly recognised. The need to understand traditional ecological knowledge for managing biodiversity by the local people has also come to be appreciated. The book therefore, attempts to provide an overall emphasis of diverse aspects of animal biodiversity, including soil, vectors of animal and plant diseases, agroecosystem diversity, forest biodiversity, marine, fresh water and island biodiversity. The impact of taxonomy, biotechnology and remote sensing, besides the conservation and management of biodiversity has also been briefly discussed.

During the last decades there has been an increasing evidence of drastic changes in marine ecosystems due to human-induced impacts, especially on benthic ecosystems. The so called “animal forests” are currently showing a dramatic loss of biomass and biodiversity all over the world. These communities are dominated by sessile suspension feeder organisms (such as sponges, corals, gorgonians, bivalves, etc.) that generate three-dimensional structures, similar to the trees in the terrestrial forest. The animal forest provide several ecosystem services such as food, protection and nursery to the associated fauna, playing an important role in the local hydrodynamic and biogeochemical cycles near the sea floor and acting also as carbon sinks. The present book focus its attention on these three dimensional animal structures including, for the first time, all the different types of animal forests of the world in a single volume.

This book offers a comprehensive study of species- and genus-level diversity and chorology of the global freshwater fauna to date. It gives a state of the art assessment of the diversity and distribution of Metazoa in the continental waters of the world.

Those of us who live in California know that it is an amazing place, and one of the reasons our state is so unique is the incredible diversity of life throughout its length and breadth. This atlas shows what the diversity of life in California is and where such resources are located.