Bøger i Population and Community Biology serien

When assuming the task of preparing a book such as this, one inevitably wonders why anyone would want to read it. I have always sympathized with Charles Elton's trenchant observation in his 1927 book that 'we have to face the fact that while ecological work is fascinating to do, it is unbearably dull to read about .

This new approach, termed 'pattern analysis' by Williams (1976), has led to a range of statistical techniques which have been enthusiastically taken up by ecologists to replace the collection of ad hoc procedures developed over the years for analysing community data.

In cataloging a dozen vertical patterns I hope to convince the reader that species interactions across trophic levels are as patterned as those along trophic levels and demand explanations equally forcefully.