Roger M. Nisbet – författare

Despite often violent fluctuations in nature, species extinction is rare. California red scale, a potentially devastating pest of citrus, has been suppressed for fifty years in California to extremely low yet stable densities by its controlling parasitoid. Some larch budmoth populations undergo extreme cycles; others never cycle. In Consumer-Resource Dynamics, William Murdoch, Cherie Briggs, and Roger Nisbet use these and numerous other biological examples to lay the groundwork for a unifying theory applicable to predator-prey, parasitoid-host, and other consumer-resource interactions. Throughout, the focus is on how the properties of real organisms affect population dynamics. The core of the book synthesizes and extends the authors' own models involving insect parasitoids and their hosts, and explores in depth how consumer species compete for a dynamic resource. The emerging general consumer-resource theory accounts for how consumers respond to differences among individuals in the resource population. From here the authors move to other models of consumer-resource dynamics and population dynamics in general.Consideration of empirical examples, key concepts, and a necessary review of simple models is followed by examination of spatial processes affecting dynamics, and of implications for biological control of pest organisms. The book establishes the coherence and broad applicability of consumer-resource theory and connects it to single-species dynamics. It closes by stressing the theory's value as a hierarchy of models that allows both generality and testability in the field.

This text addresses one of the major "inverse" problems in population ecology - that of inferring mortality rates from population numbers for a set of age classes or developmental stages. The authors set out to provide a useful method for field ecologists, and a framework from which to approach future problems. After a survey of previously published methods, an analysis is given of some basic instabilities that arise in the process of mortality estimation from stage structured population data. A concise introduction to spline theory, and the derivation of some new results, enables these instabilities to be overcome in a biologically sensible way. The resulting methods are then tested on simulated data, and their performance compared with that of previous methods. Finally, a real system with three species is investigated using the new methods.