Discontinuities in Ecosystems and Other Complex Systems

Craig R. Allen is leader of the USGS Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and associate professor in the School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska. He serves on the board of directors of the Resilience Alliance and the board of editors of the journal Ecology and Society. C. S. Holling has worked at the Institute of Resource Ecology, University of British Columbia, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna. He has also held the Arthur R. Marshall Jr. Chair in Ecological Sciences at the University of Florida, where he launched a comparative study of the structure and dynamics of ecosystems in the Florida Everglades. He is a coeditor of Columbia University Press's Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Regional Ecosystems.

• Preface Part I. Background 1. Panarchies and Discontinuities, by Crawford S. Holling and Garry D. Peterson 2. Self-organization and Discontinuities in Ecosystems, by Garry D. Peterson 3. Discontinuity, by Multimodality, by Graeme S. Cumming and Tanya D. Havlicek 4. Discontinuities in Body-Size Distributions: A View from the Top, by Pablo A. Marquet, by Sebastian Abades Part II. Patterns 5. Patterns of Landscape Structure, by Discontinuity, by Jan P. Sendzimir 6. Biophysical Discontinuities in the Everglades Ecosystem, by Lance H. Gunderson 7. Discontinuities in the Geographical Range Size of North American Birds and Butterflies, by Carla Restrepo and Natalia Arango 8. Discontinuities in Urban Systems: Comparison of Regional City-Size Structure in the United States, by Ahjond S. Garmestani, by Craig R. Allen 9. Evaluating the Textural Discontinuity Hypothesis: A Case for Adaptive Inference, by Craig A. Stow, by Jan P. Sendzimir Part III. Consequences 10. Dynamic Discontinuities in Ecologic-Economic Systems, by J. Barkley Rosser Jr. 11. The Ecological Significance of Discontinuities in Body-Mass Distributions, by Jennifer J. Skillen and Brian A. Maurer 12. Cross-Scale Structure and the Generation of Innovation and Novelty in Discontinuous Complex Systems, by Craig R. Allen and Crawford S. Holling Synthesis Donald Ludwig References Contributors Index

Discontinuities in Ecosystems and Other Complex Systems... is another interesting entry in the resilience literature. Conservation Biology