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Author: Ken Meter Publisher: Island Press ISBN: 1642831476 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Our current food system has decimated rural communities and confined the choices of urban consumers. Even while America continues to ramp up farm production to astounding levels, net farm income is now lower than at the onset of the Great Depression, and one out of every eight Americans faces hunger. But a healthier and more equitable food system is possible. In Building Community Food Webs, Ken Meter shows how grassroots food and farming leaders across the U.S. are tackling these challenges by constructing civic networks. Overturning extractive economic structures, these inspired leaders are engaging low-income residents, farmers, and local organizations in their quest to build stronger communities. Community food webs strive to build health, wealth, capacity, and connection. Their essential element is building greater respect and mutual trust, so community members can more effectively empower themselves and address local challenges. Farmers and researchers may convene to improve farming practices collaboratively. Health clinics help clients grow food for themselves and attain better health. Food banks engage their customers to challenge the root causes of poverty. Municipalities invest large sums to protect farmland from development. Developers forge links among local businesses to strengthen economic trade. Leaders in communities marginalized by our current food system are charting a new path forward. Building Community Food Webs captures the essence of these efforts, underway in diverse places including Montana, Hawai‘i, Vermont, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, and Minnesota. Addressing challenges as well as opportunities, Meter offers pragmatic insights for community food leaders and other grassroots activists alike.
Author: Ken Meter Publisher: Island Press ISBN: 1642831476 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Our current food system has decimated rural communities and confined the choices of urban consumers. Even while America continues to ramp up farm production to astounding levels, net farm income is now lower than at the onset of the Great Depression, and one out of every eight Americans faces hunger. But a healthier and more equitable food system is possible. In Building Community Food Webs, Ken Meter shows how grassroots food and farming leaders across the U.S. are tackling these challenges by constructing civic networks. Overturning extractive economic structures, these inspired leaders are engaging low-income residents, farmers, and local organizations in their quest to build stronger communities. Community food webs strive to build health, wealth, capacity, and connection. Their essential element is building greater respect and mutual trust, so community members can more effectively empower themselves and address local challenges. Farmers and researchers may convene to improve farming practices collaboratively. Health clinics help clients grow food for themselves and attain better health. Food banks engage their customers to challenge the root causes of poverty. Municipalities invest large sums to protect farmland from development. Developers forge links among local businesses to strengthen economic trade. Leaders in communities marginalized by our current food system are charting a new path forward. Building Community Food Webs captures the essence of these efforts, underway in diverse places including Montana, Hawai‘i, Vermont, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, and Minnesota. Addressing challenges as well as opportunities, Meter offers pragmatic insights for community food leaders and other grassroots activists alike.
Author: Joel E. Cohen Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 3642837840 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
Food webs hold a central place in ecology. They describe which organisms feed on which others in natural habitats. This book describes recently discovered empirical regularities in real food webs: it proposes a novel theory unifying many of these regularities, as well as extensive empirical data. After a general introduction, reviewing the empirical and theoretical discoveries about food webs, the second portion of the book shows that community food webs obey several striking phenomenological regularities. Some of these unify, regardless of habitat. Others differentiate, showing that habitat significantly influences structure. The third portion of the book presents a theoretical analysis of some of the unifying empirical regularities. The fourth portion of the book presents 113 community food webs. Collected from scattered sources and carefully edited, they are the empirical basis for the results in the volume. The largest available set of data on community food webs provides a valuable foundation for future studies of community food webs. The book is intended for graduate students, teachers and researchers primarily in ecology. The theoretical portions of the book provide materials useful to teachers of applied combinatorics, in particular, random graphs. Researchers in random graphs will find here unsolved mathematical problems.
Author: Gary A. Polis Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 1461570077 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 475
Book Description
Reflecting the recent surge of activity in food web research fueled by new empirical data, this authoritative volume successfully spans and integrates the areas of theory, basic empirical research, applications, and resource problems. Written by recognized leaders from various branches of ecological research, this work provides an in-depth treatment of the most recent advances in the field and examines the complexity and variability of food webs through reviews, new research, and syntheses of the major issues in food web research. Food Webs features material on the role of nutrients, detritus and microbes in food webs, indirect effects in food webs, the interaction of productivity and consumption, linking cause and effect in food webs, temporal and spatial scales of food web dynamics, applications of food webs to pest management, fisheries, and ecosystem stress. Three comprehensive chapters synthesize important information on the role of indirect effects, productivity and consumer regulation, and temporal, spatial and life history influences on food webs. In addition, numerous tables, figures, and mathematical equations found nowhere else in related literature are presented in this outstanding work. Food Webs offers researchers and graduate students in various branches of ecology an extensive examination of the subject. Ecologists interested in food webs or community ecology will also find this book an invaluable tool for understanding the current state of knowledge of food web research.
Author: S. Pimm Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9400959257 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 231
Book Description
Often the meanings of words are changed subtly for interesting reasons. The implication of the word 'community' has changed from including all the organisms in an area to only those species at a particular trophic level (and often a taxonomically restricted group), for example, 'bird-community'. If this observation is correct, its probable cause is the dramatic growth in our knowledge of the ecological patterns along trophic levels (I call these horizontal patterns) and the processes that generate them. This book deals with vertical patterns - those across trophic levels -and tries to compensate for their relative neglect. In cataloging a dozen vertical patterns I hope to convince the reader that species interactions across trophic levels are as patterned as those along trophic levels and demand explanations equally forcefully. But this is not the only objective. A limited number of processes shape the patterns of species interaction; to demonstrate their existence is an essential step in understanding why ecosystems are the way they are. To achieve these aims I must resort to both mathematical techniques to develop theories and statistical techniques to decide between rival hypotheses. The level of mathematics is likely to offend nearly everyone. Some will find any mathematics too much, while others will consider the material to be old, familiar ground and probably explained with a poor regard for rigour and generality.
Author: Joel E. Cohen Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691082028 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
What is the minimum dimension of a niche space necessary to represent the overlaps among observed niches? This book presents a new technique for obtaining a partial answer to this elementary question about niche space. The author bases his technique on a relation between the combinatorial structure of food webs and the mathematical theory of interval graphs. Professor Cohen collects more than thirty food webs from the ecological literature and analyzes their statistical and combinatorial properties in detail. As a result, he is able to generalize: within habitats of a certain limited physical and temporal heterogeneity, the overlaps among niches, along their trophic (feeding) dimensions, can be represented in a one-dimensional niche space far more often than would be expected by chance alone and perhaps always. This compatibility has not previously been noticed. It indicates that real food webs fall in a small subset of the mathematically possible food webs. Professor Cohen discusses other apparently new features of real food webs, including the constant ratio of the number of kinds of prey to the number of kinds of predators in food webs that describe a community. In conclusion he discusses possible extensions and limitations of his results and suggests directions for future research.
Author: R. L. Kitching Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 113942839X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
The animal communities in plant-held water bodies, such as tree holes and pitcher plants, have become models for food-web studies. In this book, Professor Kitching introduces us to these fascinating miniature worlds and demonstrates how they can be used to tackle some of the major questions in community ecology. Based on thirty years' research in many parts of the world, this work presents much previously unpublished information, in addition to summarising over a hundred years of natural history observations by others. The book covers many aspects of the theory of food-web formation and maintenance presented with field-collected information on tree holes, bromeliads, pitcher plants, bamboo containers and the axils of fleshy plants. It is a unique introduction for the field naturalist and a stimulating source treatment for graduate students and professionals working in the fields of tropical and other forest ecology, as well as entomology.
Author: Gary A. Polis Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226673278 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 566
Book Description
Paying special attention to the fertile boundaries between terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems, this work shows not only what this new methodology means for ecology, conservation, and agriculture but also serves as a fitting tribute to Gary Polis and his major contributions to the field
Author: Peter C de Ruiter Publisher: Elsevier ISBN: 9780080460949 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 608
Book Description
Dynamic Food Webs challenges us to rethink what factors may determine ecological and evolutionary pathways of food web development. It touches upon the intriguing idea that trophic interactions drive patterns and dynamics at different levels of biological organization: dynamics in species composition, dynamics in population life-history parameters and abundances, and dynamics in individual growth, size and behavior. These dynamics are shown to be strongly interrelated governing food web structure and stability and the role of populations and communities play in ecosystem functioning. Dynamic Food Webs not only offers over 100 illustrations, but also contains 8 riveting sections devoted to an understanding of how to manage the effects of environmental change, the protection of biological diversity and the sustainable use of natural resources. Dynamic Food Webs is a volume in the Theoretical Ecology series. Relates dynamics on different levels of biological organization: individuals, populations, and communities Deals with empirical and theoretical approaches Discusses the role of community food webs in ecosystem functioning Proposes methods to assess the effects of environmental change on the structure of biological communities and ecosystem functioning Offers an analyses of the relationship between complexity and stability in food webs
Author: John C. Moore Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191646423 Category : Mathematics Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
This novel book bridges the gap between the energetic and species approaches to studying food webs, addressing many important topics in ecology. Species, matter, and energy are common features of all ecological systems. Through the lens of complex adaptive systems thinking, the authors explore how the inextricable relationship between species, matter, and energy can explain how systems are structured and how they persist in real and model systems. Food webs are viewed as open and dynamic systems. The central theme of the book is that the basis of ecosystem persistence and stability rests on the interplay between the rates of input of energy into the system from living and dead sources, and the patterns in utilization of energy that result from the trophic interactions among species within the system. To develop this theme, the authors integrate the latest work on community dynamics, ecosystem energetics, and stability. In so doing, they present a unified ecology that dispels the categorization of the field into the separate subdisciplines of population, community, and ecosystem ecology. Energetic Food Webs is suitable for both graduate level students and professional researchers in the general field of ecology. It will be of particular relevance and use to those working in the specific areas of food webs, species dynamics, material and energy cycling, as well as community and ecosystem ecology.
Author: Ken Meter
Author: Ken Meter
Author: Joel E. Cohen
Author: Gary A. Polis
Author: S. Pimm
Author: Joel E. Cohen
Author: R. L. Kitching
Author: Gary A. Polis
Author: Peter C de Ruiter
Author: Kevin S. McCann
Author: John C. Moore