Ocean Ecology: Marine Life in the Age of Humans

Marine ecology is more interdisciplinary, broader in scope, and more intimately linked to human activities than ever before. Ocean Ecology provides advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and practitioners with an integrated approach to marine ecology that reflects these new scientific realities, and prepares students for the challenges of studying and managing the ocean as a complex adaptive system. This authoritative and accessible textbook advances a framework based on interactions among four major features of marine ecosystems—geomorphology, the abiotic environment, biodiversity, and biogeochemistry—and shows how life is a driver of environmental conditions and dynamics. Ocean Ecology explains the ecological processes that link organismal to ecosystem scales and that shape the major types of ocean ecosystems, historically and in today’s Anthropocene world.

Features

Provides an integrated new approach to understanding and managing the ocean

Shows how biological diversity is the heart of functioning ecosystems

Spans genes to earth systems, surface to seafloor, and estuary to ocean gyre

Links species composition, trait distribution, and other ecological structures to the functioning of ecosystems

Explains how fishing, fossil fuel combustion, industrial fertilizer use, and other human impacts are transforming the Anthropocene ocean

An essential textbook for students and an invaluable resource for practitioners