Provides a critical and evaluative introduction to the science of ecology. Alan Beeby and Anne-Maria Brennan present a succinct survey of ecology, describing and explaining the relationship between living organisms and their environment.
The third edition of this popular book continues to introduce ecology from a human perspective. This view of humanity as part of the ecology of the planet makes the fundamental relevance of ecology to all life science students apparent throughout.
First Ecology develops in sequence the core hierarchies in ecology: subcellular; population; ecosystem; landscape; and planetary. Understanding these hierarchies - and the interplay between them - is crucial to the environmental decisions our species faces at the start of the twenty-first century.