Lectures on Mathematics in the Life Sciences – serie

Several data banks around the world are accumulating DNA sequences at a feverish rate, with tremendous potential for furthering our knowledge of how biological systems code and pass on information. The sophisticated mathematical analysis of that data is just beginning. The Eighteenth Annual Symposium on Some Mathematical Questions in Biology was held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the AAAS and brought together speakers knowledgeable in both biology and mathematics to discuss these developments and to emphasize the need for rigorous, efficient computational tools.These computational tools include biologically relevant definitions of sequence similarity and string matching algorithms. The solutions for some of these problems have great generality; the string matching methods first developed for biological sequences have now been applied to areas such as geology, linguistics, and speech recognition. There is a great potential here for creating of new mathematics to handle this growing data base, with new applications for many areas of mathematics, computer science, and statistics.

This collection of papers addresses a variety of problems and approaches for predicting spatial effects in ecological systems. The central themes are the characterization of effects, exploration of mechanisms, and understanding of consequences of spatial heterogeneity on ecological systems. Discussed here are the spatial dynamics of natural systems and the impact of economic and sociological changes, as well as recent adaptation methods from statistical lattice physics.Progress in dealing with spatial effects in ecological systems is accelerating as faster computers access the extensive data sets available from remote sensing. The new mathematical approaches presented here will be especially useful for identifying the effect of landscape change on ecosystem productivity and sustainability. Balancing theoretical development and empirical testing, this book provides an excellent introduction to the scope and scale of issues to be addressed in predicting change in ecological systems. Mathematicians and ecologists interested in these issues will find this book useful, and individual chapters will be of interest to physicists, econometricians, landscape ecologists, and human ecologists.