Essentials of Ecology

by Colin R. Townsend, John L. Harper, Michael Begon

Essentials of Ecology outlines the major tenets of ecology in a concise and simplified manner for the introductory level student. It presents a balanced overview of ecology, with examples drawn from terrestrial and aquatic environments, and from a variety of organism types. The text, in four color throughout, is arranged in a format that engages the student at all levels. To make learning easier and more relevant, the practical applications of ecology are also stressed wherever possible.

Genres: Science, Ecology, Nonfiction, Nature, Academic, Textbooks

576 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

Reviews

[Leah Markum]

I love ecology. It's a complex science that takes aspects of other sciences into consideration. As such, I have read a LOT of ecology-based books, including other textbooks. "Essentials of Ecology" is not a horrible text, but it is tired. Most examples are cliche but with the addition of statistics that our middle school audience sources left out. The language is bland, even for a textbook, and elaborations on examples are wordy and unclear. There is nothing unique to this book. However, if you don't have a strong interest in the topic and just need to get through a course, the book does touch on all basic concepts and supports those concepts with vague graphs (illustrates but would make a statistician gringe) and lists statistical values--this also means this book would have more meaning to someone who already took a college statistics course.

There are far more enlightening and readable ecology texts out there. If I didn't know that It'd give this book two stars.

[Hazel]

This is a nice book for a beginner. But you need to have basic statistical knowledge to read graphs and interpretation. I am a beginner in that field as a statistician and I enjoyed reading.