Synopsis:
Ecosystems are under continued and growing threat from human activity. To preserve them we need to understand how ecosystems function and how their structure responds to either enforced or natural change. Key ecosystem functions (fluxes of energy, nutrients and organic matter), their services (freshwater, fisheries, climate regulation) and the consequences of local and global environmental changes (including predator loss, invasion of non-native species, eutrophication and climate warming) are assessed using contemporary population-ecological, biogeochemical, molecular-genetic and modelling methods. Empirical perspectives are complemented with an introduction to formal theoretical approaches to these problems that show how individual and population-level processes control structure and function of simple consumer-resource building blocks and complex ecological networks and the relationships between biodiversity, community structure and ecosystem stability.
