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An introduction to mathematical ecology. (English) Zbl 0259.92001

New York etc.: Wiley-Interscience a Division of John Wiley & Sons. viii, 286 p. 140 s. (1969).
The author’s approach is “to pick selected topics over the whole range of mathematical ecology and then to deal in detail with those aspects that seem likely to furnish good starting points for further research.” She has achieved more than this – a book which will be of use to those who teach not only specialist courses but also general applied mathematics and to field ecologists, despite some inconsistency in the level of previous mathematical and statistical knowledge required. The book is noteworthy for critical comparisons of methods proposed by different ecologists.
The first section on population dynamics covers simple and logistic birth and death processes, age-dependent rates treated in both discrete and continuous time, competition and host-parasite models. Theoretical and simulation studies are both considered. A study of aggregated distributions and of the description of pattern leads on to quadrat and distance methods of measuring pattern, diffusion models, and – the author’s own main interest – the description of mosaics. These ideas are applied in Section 3 to the patterns of inter-relation of several species. The final section discusses species-abundance relations, measurement of diversity, classification and ordination, and a concise introduction to classical multivariate analysis.

MSC:

92-01 Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to biology
92D40 Ecology
92D20 Protein sequences, DNA sequences