Chapter 1: From growth equations for a single species to
Lotka-Volterra equations for two interacting species
Chapter 2: Challenge - Supporting farmers' decision making by
modelling livestock agroecosystems in terms of predator-prey
equations
Chapter 3: The Lotka-Volterra generalized model for multispecies
communities
Chapter 4: Challenge - Combining experiments and mathematical
modelling to predict optimal combinations of perennial crop
mixtures
Chapter 5: Niche Theory
Chapter 6: Challenge - Understanding phytoplankton dynamics in
coastal communities from resource competition
Part II: The Evolution of Cooperation
Chapter 7: Mutualism and mutualistic networks
Chapter 8: Challenge - Compartmental modelling, niche overlap and
its connection with traits
Chapter 9: Game Theory: Species as Strategies and Niche Games
Chapter 10: Challenge - Dissecting empirical interaction matrices
across different taxa and predicting their fate
Part III: Ecophysics
Chapter 11: The Maximum Entropy method and the MaxEnt Theory of
Ecology
Chapter 12: Challenge - Getting insight into the dynamics of
tropical forests
Chapter 13: Catastrophe and Early Warnings. Analogies with
thermodynamics
Chapter 14: Challenge - Using cellular automata to anticipate
desertification in arid lands and catastrophic eutrophication
shifts in lakes
Hugo Fort is a Professor at the Physics Department of the Faculty of Sciences of the Republic University (Montevideo, Uruguay) and Head of the Complex System Group. After earning his PhD in physics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1994, he conducted research on quantum field theory. Since 2001, his scientific interests evolved from theoretical physics to complex systems and mathematical modelling applied to problems in biology, with a focus in ecology & evolution. A main goal of his research is to develop quantitative methods and tools for a wide variety of practical problems in fields ranging from agro-economy to environmental and real-time evolution. Fort is currently involved in several international research collaborations pursuing used-inspired basic science. A central aim is to connect ecological and evolutionary problems with well-studied phenomena in physics to gain deeper insight into these problems, to identify novel questions and problems, and to get access to alternative powerful computational tools.
Fort's writing is engaging while still maintaining high standards
of rigorous thinking. The examples all help pin the abstract
mathematics to the natural world. If I have a quibble with the
book, it is not with Fort's writing, but with the publisher's
assembling of the manuscript. First, the pages are not numbered
consecutively from 1 to 300. Rather, the pages of each chapter are
numbered with chapter designation and page number within the
chapter. In every theoretical-application pair of chapters, the
theoretical chapter is numbered numerically followed by the related
application chapter beginning with A. Thus, at the bottom of the
pages we have for example page 3-4 as the fourth page of Chapter 3
(which is actually the seventh chapter of the book) and A3-4 as the
fourth page of the application chapter (A3) following Chapter 3. If
this sounds confusing, it is; this clumsy pagination makes it
rather difficult to find your way through the book. Secondly, the
book lacks an index so we cannot find, for example, all the
different ways that ideas such as eigenvalues are used throughout
the book. But these are minor annoyances that can hopefully be
corrected in afuture edition or printing. It should not deter
mathematicians and physicists who are interested in ecological
systems and mathematical ecologists who would like to read a fresh
approach to classical and current problems from studying this book
and thinking deeply about the issues it raises.
John Pastor, Journal of Ecological Modelling (Elsevier). --
John Pastor * Journal of Ecological Modelling (Elsevier). *
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