The Effective Ecologist covers the stuff that no-one told you about at university – how to develop your office-related and business skills to succeed in your career as a professional ecologist. This book shows you how to be more effective in your role, providing you with the skills and effective behaviours within the workplace that will enable your development as an ecologist. It explains what it means to be effective in the workplace and describes positive behaviours and how they can be adopted. It contains the skills needed for effective communication, organising projects, advice on planning, reporting and meetings and provides you with everything you need for a brilliant and successful career. In a clearly written and honest account full of real life examples, the author leaves no stone unturned as he describes how making small changes in your behaviour can have a positive impact upon your performance and how you are perceived in your working environment. Essential reading for anyone commencing or already pursuing a career in ecology who wants to perform at the highest level. In addition this work will be of great interest to team managers, business leaders and those responsible for the development of staff as a point of reference and guidance for their team.

Ecology is one of the most challenging of sciences, with unambiguous knowledge much harder to achieve than it might seem. But it is also one of the most important sciences for the future health of our planet. It is vital that our efforts are as effective as possible at achieving our desired outcomes. This book is intended to help individual ecologists to develop a better vision for their ecology – and the way they can best contribute to science. The central premise is that to advance ecology effectively as a discipline, ecologists need to be able to establish conclusive answers to key questions rather than merely proposing plausible explanations for mundane observations. Ecologists need clear and honest understanding of how we have come to do things the way we do them now, the limitations of our approaches, our goals for the future and how we may need to change our approaches if we are to maintain or enhance our relevance and credibility. Readers are taken through examples to show what a critical appraisal can reveal and how this approach can benefit ecology if it is applied more routinely. Ecological systems are notable for their complexity and their variability. Ecology is, as indicated by the title of this book, a truly difficult science. Ecologists have achieved a great deal, but they can do better. This book aims to encourage early-career researchers to be realistic about their expectations: to question everything, not to take everything for granted, and to make up their own minds.

Long-term monitoring programs are fundamental to understanding the natural environment and managing major environmental problems. Yet they are often done very poorly and ineffectively. This second edition of the highly acclaimed Effective Ecological Monitoring describes what makes monitoring programs successful and how to ensure that long-term monitoring studies persist. The book has been fully revised and updated but remains concise, illustrating key aspects of effective monitoring with case studies and examples. It includes new sections comparing surveillance-based and question-based monitoring, analysing environmental observation networks, and provides examples of adaptive monitoring. Based on the authors’ 80 years of collective experience in running long-term research and monitoring programs, Effective Ecological Monitoring is a valuable resource for the natural resource management, ecological and environmental science and policy communities.

The field of ecological restoration is a rapidly growing discipline that encompasses a wide range of activities and brings together practitioners and theoreticians from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, ranging from volunteer backyard restorationists to highly trained academic scientists and professional consultants. Ecological Restoration offers for the first time a unified vision of ecological restoration as a field of study, one that clearly states the discipline’s precepts and emphasizes issues of importance to those involved at all levels. In a lively, personal fashion, the authors discuss scientific and practical aspects of the field as well as the human needs and values that motivate practitioners. The book: -identifies fundamental concepts upon which restoration is based -considers the principles of restoration practice -explores the diverse values that are fulfilled with the restoration of ecosystems -reviews the structure of restoration practice, including the various contexts for restoration work, the professional development of its practitioners, and the relationships of restoration with allied fields and activities A unique feature of the book is the inclusion of eight “virtual field trips,” short photo essays of project sites around the world that illustrate various points made in the book and are “led” by those who were intimately involved with the project described. Throughout, ecological restoration is conceived as a holistic endeavor, one that addresses issues of ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and sustainability science simultaneously, and draws upon cultural resources and local skills and knowledge in restoration work.

Meeting today’s environmental challenges requires a new way of thinking about the intricate dependencies between humans and nature. Ecology and Ecosystem Conservation provides students and other readers with a basic understanding of the fundamental principles of ecological science and their applications, offering an essential overview of the way ecology can be used to devise strategies to conserve the health and functioning of ecosystems. The book begins by exploring the need for ecological science in understanding current environmental issues and briefly discussing what ecology is and isn’t. Subsequent chapters address critical issues in conservation and show how ecological science can be applied to them. The book explores questions such as: • What is the role of ecological science in decision making? • What factors govern the assembly of ecosystems and determine their response to various stressors? • How does Earth’s climate system function and determine the distribution of life on Earth? • What factors control the size of populations? • How does fragmentation of the landscape affect the persistence of species on the landscape? • How does biological diversity influence ecosystem processes? The book closes with a final chapter that addresses the need not only to understand ecological science, but to put that science into an ecosystem conservation ethics perspective.

A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological communities? What other scientific areas might serve as a guiding framework? As it turns out, the core focus of community ecology—understanding patterns of diversity and composition of biological variants across space and time—is shared by evolutionary biology and its very coherent conceptual framework, population genetics theory. The Theory of Ecological Communities takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole. Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching processes: selection among species, drift, dispersal, and speciation. These are analogues of the four central processes in population genetics theory—selection within species, drift, gene flow, and mutation—and together they subsume almost all of the many dozens of more specific models built to describe the dynamics of communities of interacting species. The result is a theory that allows the effects of many low-level processes, such as competition, facilitation, predation, disturbance, stress, succession, colonization, and local extinction to be understood as the underpinnings of high-level processes with widely applicable consequences for ecological communities. Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, The Theory of Ecological Communities provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.