Toward a Unified Ecology

Download or read book Toward a Unified Ecology written by Timothy F. H. Allen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of Toward a Unified Ecology was ahead of its time. For the second edition, the authors present a new synthesis of their core ideas on evaluating communities, organisms, populations, biomes, models, and management. The book now places greater emphasis on post-normal critiques, cognizant of ever-present observer values in the system. The problem it addresses is how to work holistically on complex things that cannot be defined, and this book continues to build an approach to the problem of scaling in ecosystems. Provoked by complexity theory, the authors add a whole new chapter on the central role of narrative in science and how models improve them. The book takes data and modeling seriously, with a sophisticated philosophy of science.