Preface to the Princeton Landmarks in Biology Edition vii Preface xi Symbols Used xiii 1. The Importance of Islands 3 2. Area and Number of Speicies 8 3. Further Explanations of the Area-Diversity Pattern 19 4. The Strategy of Colonization 68 5. Invasibility and the Variable Niche 94 6. Stepping Stones and Biotic Exchange 123 7. Evolutionary Changes Following Colonization 145 8. Prospect 181 Glossary 185 References 193 Index 201

The Theory of Island Biogeography

Statistics for Spatial Data.

Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales. Material demands of production and human consumption alter land use and cover, biodiversity, and hydrosystems locally to regionally, and urban waste discharge affects local to global biogeochemical cycles and climate. For urbanites, however, global environmental changes are swamped by dramatic changes in the local environment. Urban ecology integrates natural and social sciences to study these radically altered local environments and their regional and global effects. Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanized world.

http://leml.asu.edu/jingle/web_pages/wu_pubs/pdf_files/grimm_etal-2008-gc+ecology of cities.pdf

Global Change and the Ecology of Cities

Remote sensing imagery needs to be converted into tangible information which can be utilised in conjunction with other data sets, often within widely used Geographic Information Systems (GIS). As long as pixel sizes remained typically coarser than, or at the best, similar in size to the objects of interest, emphasis was placed on per-pixel analysis, or even sub-pixel analysis for this conversion, but with increasing spatial resolutions alternative paths have been followed, aimed at deriving objects that are made up of several pixels. This paper gives an overview of the development of object based methods, which aim to delineate readily usable objects from imagery while at the same time combining image processing and GIS functionalities in order to utilize spectral and contextual information in an integrative way. The most common approach used for building objects is image segmentation, which dates back to the 1970s. Around the year 2000 GIS and image processing started to grow together rapidly through object based image analysis (OBIA - or GEOBIA for geospatial object based image analysis). In contrast to typical Landsat resolutions, high resolution images support several scales within their images. Through a comprehensive literature review several thousand abstracts have been screened, and more than 820 OBIA-related articles comprising 145 journal papers, 84 book chapters and nearly 600 conference papers, are analysed in detail. It becomes evident that the first years of the OBIA/GEOBIA developments were characterised by the dominance of ‘grey’ literature, but that the number of peer-reviewed journal articles has increased sharply over the last four to five years. The pixel paradigm is beginning to show cracks and the OBIA methods are making considerable progress towards a spatially explicit information extraction workflow, such as is required for spatial planning as well as for many monitoring programmes.

Object based image analysis for remote sensing

Biological invasions into wholly new regions are a consequence of a far reaching but underappreciated component of global environmental change, the human-caused breakdown of biogeographic barriers to species dispersal . Human activity moves species from place to place both accidentally and deliberately-and it does so at rates that are without precedent in the last tens of millions of years. As a result , taxa that evolved in isolation from each other are being forced into contact in an instant of evolutionary time. This human-caused breakdown of barriers to dispersal sets in motion changes that may seem less important than the changing composition of the atmosphere , climate change , or tropical deforestation-but they are significant for several reasons. First , to date , biological invasions have caused more species extinctions than have resulted from human-caused climatic change or the changing composition of the atmosphere . Only land use change probably has caused more extinction, and (as we later discuss) land use change interacts strongly with biological invasions. Second, the effects of human-caused biological invasions are long-term: changes in climate, the atmosphere, and land use may be reversible in hundreds to thousands of years, but the breakdown of biogeographic barriers has resulted in self-maintaining and evolving

Biological invasions by exotic grasses, the grass/fire cycle, and global change

Species diversity has declined in ecosystems worldwide as a result of habitat fragmentation, eutrophication, and land-use change. If such decline is to be halted ecological mechanisms that restore or maintain biodiversity are needed. Two long-term field experiments were performed in native grassland to assess the effects of fire, nitrogen addition, and grazing or mowing on plant species diversity. In one experiment, richness declined on burned and fertilized treatments, whereas mowing maintained diversity under these conditions. In the second experiment, loss of species diversity due to frequent burning was reversed by bison, a keystone herbivore in North American grasslands. Thus, mowing or the reestablishment of grazing in anthropogenically stressed grasslands enhanced biodiversity.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/280/5364/745.full.pdf

Modulation of Diversity by Grazing and Mowing in Native Tallgrass Prairie

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/bisi.1999.49.1.39

The Keystone Role of Bison in North American Tallgrass Prairie

Woody plant expansion is one of the greatest contemporary threats to mesic grasslands of the central United States. In this article, we synthesize more than 20 years of research to elucidate the causes and consequences of the ongoing transition of C4-dominated grasslands to savanna-like ecosystems codominated by grasses and woody plants. This transition is contingent on fire-free intervals, which provide the opportunity for recruitment both of new individuals and of additional shrub and tree species into this grassland. Once shrubs establish, their cover increases regardless of fire frequency, and infrequent fires accelerate the spread of some shrub species. This process has resulted in a new dynamic state of shrub–grass coexistence in the mesic grasslands of North America. Important consequences of this shift in plant life-form abundance include alterations in plant productivity, species diversity, and carbon storage. Without drastic measures such as mechanical removal of shrubs, it is unlikely ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1641/0006-3568%282005%29055%5B0243%3AAEITCA%5D2.0.CO%3B2

An Ecosystem in Transition: Causes and Consequences of the Conversion of Mesic Grassland to Shrubland

http://www.cof.orst.edu/cof/fs/turner/pdfs/turner_rse_1999.pdf

John M. Briggs

Papers

Global Change and the Ecology of Cities

Modulation of Diversity by Grazing and Mowing in Native Tallgrass Prairie

The Keystone Role of Bison in North American Tallgrass Prairie

An Ecosystem in Transition: Causes and Consequences of the Conversion of Mesic Grassland to Shrubland

Relationships between leaf area index and Landsat TM spectral vegetation indices across three temperate zone sites