Global marine ecology book published
Up until recently, there was little recognition that changes in local groups of seaweeds, marine invertebrates and fish that we might see while walking a short distance at the beach or rocky coast - or by swimming underwater over a coral reef or kelp forest could be caused by large scale forces beyond the local area.
Accordingly, ecologists have slowly expanded the spatial and temporal scale of their investigations in an effort to understand the fingerprint of large-scale forces such as El Nino climate oscillations, worldwide depletion of predatory fish by fisheries and global changes in climate, on local marine communities. However, there has been no synthesis of global ocean and shoreline ecology to date. Marine Macroecology, edited by Jon D. Witman and Kaustuv Roy and published by the University of Chicago Press, fills this void by synthesizing what is known about global and latitudinal patterns of marine biodiversity and distribution, the processes causing them and the questions needed for further study of global change in the oceans.
From the back cover:
“With the oceans covering two-thirds of the planet, the field of macroecology must have a strong marine component. This book provides the essential foundation of what is known, what needs to be discovered, and how this can be achieved. It contains sufficient ideas to inspire a generation of marine macroecologists.”
--Kevin J. Gaston, University of Sheffield
“This volume compiles and synthesizes an impressive body of work in marine macroecology, most of it done in the last twenty years since the term macroecology was coined. The chapters and studies cited in this book demonstrate why a big picture, statistical framework is especially applicable to the oceans, where intensive local studies and experimental manipulations are difficult, but where standardized large scale databases are providing a wealth of new data. Now it will be instructive to compare the macroecology of the marine and terrestrial realms: there are striking differences in physical environments and kinds of organisms, but equally striking similarities in patterns of abundance, distribution and diversity.”
-- James H. Brown, University of New Mexico