F. I. Woodward - Böcker

This book will be of value to all disciplines of science concerned with the influence of the environment on biological systems. With the revolution in microprocessors, 'intelligent' instruments can be constructed that control the operation and collect, validate and store the data. A review of the present technology and its applications for the immediate future is overdue. The text is aimed at two levels: first, to introduce the student to the science of environmental measurement, its importance in biological systems and the various techniques available; second, as a reference book to allow the research worker to assess the relative merits of each device. An important feature is the inclusion of detailed information on the accuracy, precision and calibration of each technique, which will assist in the selection of appropriate instruments and point to any practical problems that may be encountered. Obvious users of this book will be environmental biologists, plant and animal physiologists, and ecologists, although it will also be of value to mycologists, entomologists, zoologists, soil scientists and agricultural engineers at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate level.

The central thesis for plant ecology is that climate exerts the dominant control on the distribution of the major vegetation types of the world. This book sets out to examine this often neglected area in two ways. In the first part the author analyses the distribution of species in relation to climate over different scales of time and place. In the second, he reviews the various approaches to explaining observed correlation between plant distribution and climate, and to establishing the mechanisms of control in physiological and biochemical terms. Dr Woodward is an authority on plant-climate relationships, and has made some of the most important contributions to our understanding of the subject. This book builds on his extensive knowledge of the subject to provide a modern text on this basic problem of plant ecology, encompassing the techniques of palaeoecology, climatology, ecology, physiology, biochemistry and genetics.

Attempts to model the effects of global change are inhibited by a lack of information about how individual plant and animal species will respond. One way of reducing the problem is to develop models treating a smaller number of groups or 'functional types' with similar characteristics. This 1977 book describes approaches and methods for defining these functional types in ways which maximize our potential to predict accurately the responses of real vegetation with real species diversity.