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"This volume provides a series of essays on open questions in ecology with the overarching goal being to outline to the most important, most interesting or most fundamental problems in ecology that need to be addressed. The contributions span ecological subfields, from behavioral ecology and population ecology to disease ecology and conservation and range in tone from the technical to more personal meditations on the state of the field. Many of the chapters start or end in moments of genuine curiosity, like one which takes up the question of why the world is green or another which asks what might come of a thought experiment in which we "turn-off" evolution entirely"--.

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• PART I: Populations, Variability, and Scaling
  • Ecological Scaling in Space and Time: A New Tool in Plain Sight?
  • How Will Organisms Respond to Complex, Novel Environments?
  • Variance-Explicit Ecology: A Call for Holistic Study of the Consequences of Variability at Multiple Scales
  • Why Does Intra-Genotypic Variance Persist?
  • Population Dynamics of Species with Complex Life Cycles
  • What Determines Population Density?
• PART II: Population Biology and the Ecology of Individuals
  • Neglected Problems in Ecology: Interdependence and Mutualism
  • Ecology “through the Looking Glass”: What Might Be the Ecological Consequences of Stopping Mutation?
  • Ecology and Evolution Is Hindered by the Lack of Individual-Based Data
  • Do Temperate and Tropical Birds Have Different Mating Systems?
  • Leaf Structure and Function
• PART III: Coexistence
  • The Dimensions of Species Coexistence
  • Evolution, Speciation, and the Persistence Paradox
  • What Is the Species Richness Distribution?
  • Two Sides of the Same Coin: High Non-Neutral Diversity and High-Dimensional Trait Space in Pathogen Populations and Ecological Communities
• PART IV: Ecological Communities and Ecosystems
  • What Regulates Growth across Levels of Organization?
  • The Ecosystem: Superorganism, or Collection of Individuals?
  • Untangling Food Webs
  • What Determines the Abundance of Lianas and Vines?
  • The World Beneath Us: Making Soil Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Central to Environmental Policy
• PART V: Ecology and Health
  • Ecology and Medicines
  • Six Wedges to Curing Disease
• PART VI: Conservation Biology and Natural Resource Management
  • Collective Cooperation: From Ecological Communities to Global Governance and Back
  • Keeping the Faith: The Case for Very-Large Terrestrial and Marine Protected Areas
  • How Does Biodiversity Relate to Ecosystem Functioning in Natural Ecosystems?
• PART VII: Final Thoughts
  • A Science Business Model for Answering Important Questions
  • Going Big
• Index