Vegetation Dynamics And Global Change

The response of forests to global climate change is one of the most hotly contested issues in the greenhouse effect debate. Much effort is being devoted to the construction of models which describe the function of the forests and their rate of change. There are many techniques available to project large-scale vegetation patterns, all based on different underlying models that contain fundamental biological and ecological mechanisms. This text introduces both students and professionals to the sophisticated mathematical and computational tools used to predict the rate of change in the world's forests. It emphasizes the importance of scale in global studies. Leaders in the field of vegetation modelling cover physiological phenomena typically measured at small time and space scales; the stand dynamics of forests; large-scale models of forest dynamics; the reconstruction of forest vegetation of past climates as a way to understand current global changes; and the role of forests in the global carbon cycle. This book should be of interest to students and professionals in the fields of ecology; earth science; forestry and biomathematics.