"This completely new edition of Terrestrial Vegetation of California clearly documents the extraordinary complexity and richness of the plant communities and of the state and the forces that shape them. This volume is a storehouse of information of value to anyone concerned with meeting the challenge of understanding, managing or conserving these unique plant communities under the growing threats of climate change, biological invasions and development."—Harold Mooney, Professor of Environmental Biology, Stanford University "The plants of California are under threat like never before. Traditional pressures of development and invasive species have been joined by a newly-recognized threat: human-caused climate change. It is essential that we thoroughly understand current plant community dynamics in order to have a hope of conserving them. This book represents an important, well-timed advance in knowledge of the vegetation of this diverse state and is an essential resource for professionals, students, and the general public alike."—Brent Mishler, Director of the University & Jepson Herbaria and Professor of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley

Relationships between wildlife and their habitats are examined in a series of matrixes, species narratives, and distribution maps.

This long-anticipated reference and sourcebook for CaliforniaÕs remarkable ecological abundance provides an integrated assessment of each major ecosystem typeÑits distribution, structure, function, and management. A comprehensive synthesis of our knowledge about this biologically diverse state, Ecosystems of California covers the state from oceans to mountaintops using multiple lenses: past and present, flora and fauna, aquatic and terrestrial, natural and managed. Each chapter evaluates natural processes for a specific ecosystem, describes drivers of change, and discusses how that ecosystem may be altered in the future. This book also explores the drivers of CaliforniaÕs ecological patterns and the history of the stateÕs various ecosystems, outlining how the challenges of climate change and invasive species and opportunities for regulation and stewardship could potentially affect the stateÕs ecosystems. The text explicitly incorporates both human impacts and conservation and restoration efforts and shows how ecosystems support human well-being. Edited by two esteemed ecosystem ecologists and with overviews by leading experts on each ecosystem, this definitive work will be indispensable for natural resource management and conservation professionals as well as for undergraduate or graduate students of CaliforniaÕs environment and curious naturalists.

Numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain the dynamics in abundance of individual species, how species interact, how communities assemble, and how interactions between biotic and abiotic processes shape ecosystem stability. Many if not most of these hypotheses find some degree of support, but often only within relatively narrow spatial and temporal ranges. This is because conditions vary over time and from place to place, and so the strength and extent of processes that were the focus of a given a hypothesis become altered by other forces. Ecologists have confronted variability from two perspectives; conceptual and statistical. Conceptually, spatial and temporal variability are now recognized as being scale dependent and hierarchical. Statistically, there are many models that ecologists readily use that account for the hierarchical and scale-dependence of variability present in many datasets. But linking the two perspectives into a meaningful understanding of what variability means in real systems has been much less successful. For example, it is common to see studies where the fixed effects of a generalized linear mixed model are reported, but very often random effects are completely ignored or, at best, given scant attention. The likelihood of this being a significant problem increases greatly in what are rapidly becoming more common studies that utilize datasets spanning long temporal and/or large spatial scales, or when extreme and often unpredictable events (gray and black swans) occur.