Product Description

Forest Ecology uses an ecosystem approach to understanding the ecology of forests. It examines the form and function of forest ecosystems and how they change over time in response to natural and human-caused disturbances.
Features and Benefits

A complete treatment of the ecosystem including all the major structural components and functional processes of the forest ecosystem.
Uses a systems or wholistic view of the forest ecosystem, rather than the more traditional reductionist and “building-block” view.
Gives equal emphasis to ecosystem function, the physical environment, the biotic processes (population and community ecology) and ecosystem change overtime.
Examines forest ecology in the context of sustainable development and population growth.
Richly illustrated with line drawings, graphs, tables and photographs which complement and amplify the text material.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1356671 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 596 pages

About the Author

James Peter Kimmins Following an undergraduate degree in Forestry from the University of Wales and an M.Sc. in Forest Entomology from the University of California at Berkeley, James Peter Kimmins, generally known as Hamish, received his PhD in Forest Ecology at Yale University, focusing on the relationship between ecosystem function and herbivore population dynamics. Since 1969 he has been a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, where he has presented courses on forest ecology, ecosystem classification, ecological aspects of silviculture, environmental issues in forestry, ecosystem function and response to disturbance, and modeling forest ecosystems to undergraduates, graduate students and professional foresters. He has developed and currently tutors a UBC web-based Distance Education course in Forest Ecology. The fifty-three graduate students he has supervised over the past thirty-five years have studied nearly all aspects of forest ecology from ecophysiology to nutrient cycling and production ecology, to succession, landscape ecology and modeling.

For the past twenty-six years, Dr. Kimmins has worked to develop ecologically-based forest ecosystem management models, from the spatially-explicit, individual tree stand model FORCEE, to the a-spatial stand model FORECAST, to the spatial, local landscape, complex disturbance patch model LLEMS, and the spatial watershed ecosystem management model POSSIBLE FOREST FUTURES. These models range from a high school education forest management game (FORTOON), to decision support and research tools, to scenario analysis and value tradeoff assessment tools. He is currently a Senior Canada Research Chair in Modeling the Sustainability of Forest Ecosystems, and is Director of the Forest Ecosystem Management Modeling Group in the Department of Forest Sciences. Dr. Kimmins is a member of UNESCO's World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology (COMEST). and serves on many science advisory boards.