Chaos in Ecology

Book excerpt: Chaos in Ecology is a convincing demonstration of chaos in a biological population. The book synthesizes an ecologically focused interdisciplinary blend of non-linear dynamics theory, statistics, and experimentation yielding results of uncommon clarity and rigor. Topics include fundamental issues that are of general and widespread importance to population biology and ecology. Detailed descriptions are included of the mathematical, statistical, and experimental steps they used to explore nonlinear dynamics in ecology. Beginning with a brief overview of chaos theory and its implications for ecology. The book continues by deriving and rigorously testing a mathematical model that is closely wedded to biological mechanisms of their research organism. Therefrom were generated a variety of predictions that are fundamental to chaos theory and experiments were designed and analyzed to test those predictions. Discussion of patterns in chaos and how they can be investigated using real data follows and book ends with a discussion of the salient lessons learned from this research program Book jacket.