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| View Larger Image | Biodiversity: An Introduction | Paperbackby Kevin J. Gaston (Author), John I. Spicer (Author)
| List Price: | $65.00 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Wiley-Blackwell | | Edition: | 2nd Edition | | Page Count: | 208 Pages | | Publication Date: | February 23, 2004 | | Sales Rank: | 831,407st |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD ARTWORKThis concise introductory text provides a complete overview of biodiversity - what it is, how it arose, its distribution, why it is important, human impact upon it, and what should be done to maintain it.Timely overview of the serious attempts made to quantify and describe biodiversity in a scientific way Acts as an easy entry point into the primary literature Provides real-world examples of key issues, including illustrations of major temporal and spatial patterns in biodiversity Designed primarily with undergraduate students and course lecturers in mind, it will also be of interest to anyone who requires an overview of, and entry to, the vast literature on these topics. All the figures included in the book are downloadable from the Blackwell Publishing website |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 1 review)
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Tries to do too much.. by S. Goetz (Woods Hole, MA)  3 Stars
July 03, 2000
This is a very terse book. The stated purpose, according to the authors (Kevin Gaston and John Spicer at the University of Sheffield, UK) is to "cover as much ground in as few pages as possible." It succeeds, to a limited extent, by providing an outline to key issues associated with biodiversity research. It supplements this skeletal approach with numerous references for additional reading, and a few URLs. While there is a clear need for a succinct reader on biodiversity, I cannot recommend this book as a good introductory text. It tries to be too broad (including, e.g., biodiversity below the earth's surface) rather than being more informative on a focused range of topics. As a result the coverage on many of the topics is maddeningly shallow - for example, 1 page on species-area relationships, 1/3rd of a page on local versus regional diversity (without reference to alpha, beta, gamma diversity), a short paragraph on patterns of diversity with productivity, and a discussion of endemism without reference to historical or spatial isolation. One way the 113-page book might have been better executed in comparable length is by omitting the marginally informative 5th chapter on "maintaining biodiversity," which uses 1/6th of the book's length to outline the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Despite these crippling problems the book does convey many of the critical issues facing scientists, environmentalists and policy makers in this poorly understood (and frequently misrepresented) subject. The first 3 chapters provide a useful overview of the elements and surrogates for biodiversity, historical diversification, and some of the challenges to mapping biodiversity at a range of spatial scales.
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