A broad view of plant-pathogen interactions illustrating the fundamental reciprocal role pathogens and hosts play in shaping each other's ecology and evolution.

This volume sits at the cross-roads of a number of areas of scientific interest that, in the past, have largely kept themselves separate - agriculture, forestry, population genetics, ecology, conservation biology, genomics and the protection of plant genetic resources. Yet these areas also have a lot of common interests and increasingly these independent lines of inquiry are tending to coalesce into a more comprehensive view of the complexity of plant-pathogen associations and their ecological and evolutionary dynamics. This interdisciplinary source provides a comprehensive overview of this changing situation by identifying the role of pathogens in shaping plant populations, species and communities, tackling the issue of the increasing importance of invasive and newly emerging diseases and giving broader recognition to the fundamental importance of the influence of space and time (as manifest in the metapopulation concept) in driving epidemiological and co-evolutionary trajectories.

Parasites exhibit a range of life-history strategies that influence spatial and temporal disease dynamics, epidemiology development and, through this, the genetic diversity and spatial structure of their populations, and the evolutionary dynamics within populations. Parasites exhibit a range of life-history traits, including different life-cycle complexity, dispersal and survival strategies, transmission modes, and dispersal ability. These are important determinants of the frequency and predictability of interactions with host species. These determinants are also involved in the ability of parasites to adapt to varying ecological factors including changes in the abiotic environment, evolution of agrosystem characteristics, and direct or indirect competition with other co-occurrence parasites species. The aim of this Research Topic is to collect studies on plant pathogen life history traits and adaptation to environmental constraints.

Introduces readers to key case studies that illustrate how theory and data can be integrated to understand wildlife disease ecology.

Spatial Ecology addresses the fundamental effects of space on the dynamics of individual species and on the structure, dynamics, diversity, and stability of multispecies communities. Although the ecological world is unavoidably spatial, there have been few attempts to determine how explicit considerations of space may alter the predictions of ecological models, or what insights it may give into the causes of broad-scale ecological patterns. As this book demonstrates, the spatial structure of a habitat can fundamentally alter both the qualitative and quantitative dynamics and outcomes of ecological processes. Spatial Ecology highlights the importance of space to five topical areas: stability, patterns of diversity, invasions, coexistence, and pattern generation. It illustrates both the diversity of approaches used to study spatial ecology and the underlying similarities of these approaches. Over twenty contributors address issues ranging from the persistence of endangered species, to the maintenance of biodiversity, to the dynamics of hosts and their parasitoids, to disease dynamics, multispecies competition, population genetics, and fundamental processes relevant to all these cases. There have been many recent advances in our understanding of the influence of spatially explicit processes on individual species and on multispecies communities. This book synthesizes these advances, shows the limitations of traditional, non-spatial approaches, and offers a variety of new approaches to spatial ecology that should stimulate ecological research.

Coevolution—reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species driven by natural selection—is one of the most important ecological and genetic processes organizing the earth's biodiversity: most plants and animals require coevolved interactions with other species to survive and reproduce. The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution analyzes how the biology of species provides the raw material for long-term coevolution, evaluates how local coadaptation forms the basic module of coevolutionary change, and explores how the coevolutionary process reshapes locally coevolving interactions across the earth's constantly changing landscapes. Picking up where his influential The Coevolutionary Process left off, John N. Thompsonsynthesizes the state of a rapidly developing science that integrates approaches from evolutionary ecology, population genetics, phylogeography, systematics, evolutionary biochemistry and physiology, and molecular biology. Using models, data, and hypotheses to develop a complete conceptual framework, Thompson also draws on examples from a wide range of taxa and environments, illustrating the expanding breadth and depth of research in coevolutionary biology.