Biodiversity Dynamics

The contributors to Biodiversity Dynamics bring together the cutting-edge findings of a number of different fields that have traditionally had little cross-over: data from population biology, community ecology, comparative biology, and paleontology are all presented. Editor Michael L. McKinney begins the book with an overview of the concept of biodiversity dynamics, explaining why turnover needs to be addressed in terms of all scales of time and space and why it is so important to look at speciation and extinction together, as interdependent processes.

Biodiversity Dynamics is divided into two parts, the first exploring turnover at the species level and the second investigating larger-scale community and ecosystem turnover. Contributors in part 1 write on such topics as the relationship of geographic range to diversification and extinction rates, the phylogenetic constraints on evolution of various traits, and the evolution of complexity. In part 2, papers focus on such subjects as how fine- and course-scale observation of ecosystems often yield widely disparate results, the question of diversity equilibrium over the ages, and how evolutionary turnover is crucial to understanding the origins of biodiversity.

Where paleontologists and ecologists have long had divergent perspectives, Biodiversity Dynamics seeks a middle ground, finding ways for both scientific communities to work together to comprehend the great biodiversity ofthe earth and how to preserve it for future generations.

Contents

• Introduction; Michael McKinney
• Biodiversity dynamics: Niche preemption and saturation in diversity equilibria; Michael McKinney
• Phylogenetic Turnover: From Populations through Higher Taxa;
• Do taxa persist as metapopulations in evolutionary time?; Susan Harrison
• Geographic range fragmentation and the evolution of biological diversity; Brian Maurer and Phillip Nott
• Detecting ecological pattern in phylogenies; John Gittleman, C. Anderson, S. Cates, H-K Luh, H. Hilton, N. Leahy, R-L Wan
• Testing models of speciation and extinction with phylogenetic trees of extant taxa; Jody Hey, Holly Hinton, Nicholas Leahy, Rong-Lin Wang
• Dynamics of diversification in state space; Daniel W. McShea
• Diversification of body sizes: patterns and processes in the assembly of terrestrial mammal faunas; Douglas A. Kelt and James H. Brown
• The role of development in evolutionary radiations; Gunther J. Eble
• Declining taxonomic turnover in geologic time; Norman Gilinsky
• Community Turnover: From Populations through Global Diversity;
• Scaling the ecosystem: A hierarchical view of stasis and change; Kenneth M. Schopf and Linda C. Ivany
• Nested patterns of species distribution: processes and implications; Alan Cutler
• Diversification of North American mammals: a test of equilibrial dynamics; John Alroy
• Scales of diversification and the Ordovician radiation; Arnold I. Miller and Shuguang Mao
• Preston's ergodic conjecture: the accumulation of species in space and time; Michael L. Rosenweig
• An intermediate disturbance hypothesis of maximal speciation; Warren Allmon, Paul Morris, Michael McKinney
• Turnover dynamics across ecological and geologicalscales; Gareth Russell
• Catastrophic fluctuations in nutrient levels as an agent of mass extinction: upward scaling of ecological processes?; Ronald E. Martin
• Scale-independent interpretations of macroevolutionary dynamics; Richard B. Aronson and Roy E. Plotnick
• Author Biography: Michael L. McKinney is professor of geology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
• James A. Drake is an associate professor in the Department of Zoology and the Graduate Ecology Program at the University of Tennessee.