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Features: The only insect ecology text that emphasizes insect effects on ecosystem properties and services, as well as evolutionary adaptations to environmental conditions. Includes new material on long-term trends in insect abundance, addressing the so-called "insect apocalypse?. Offers crucial updates on mechanisms by which insects affect, and potentially regulate, ecosystem structure and function. Applies ecological principles to improved management of insects for the sustainable delivery of ecosystem services
List of contents
1. Overview
SECTION I: Ecology of Individual Insects
2. Responses to Abiotic Conditions
3. Resource Acquisition
4. Resource Allocation
SECTION II: Population Ecology
5. Population Systems
6. Population Dynamics
7. Biogeography
SECTION III: Community Ecology
8. Species Interactions
9. Community Structure
10. Community Dynamics
SECTION IV: Ecosystem Level
11. Ecosystem Structure and Function
12. Herbivory
13. Pollination, Seed Predation and Seed Dispersal
14. Decomposition and Pedogenesis
15. Insects as Regulators of Ecosystem Processes
Section V. Applications and Synthesis
16. Insects and Ecosystem Services
17. Applications to Pest Management and Conservation
18. Synthesis
About the author
Timothy D. Schowalter received his Ph.D. degree in Entomology from the University of Georgia in 1979. He is currently a Professor of Entomology at Louisiana State University, where he also served as the department head until 2015. Previously, he was a professor of entomology at Oregon State University, Corvallis. Dr. Schowalter served as Program Director for Integrative and Theoretical Ecology at the National Science Foundation, where he was involved in developing global change and terrestrial ecosystem research initiatives at the federal level. He also served as a U.S. delegate to international conventions to develop collaboration between U.S. Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites and long-term sites in Hungary and East Asia and the Pacific.