🚀 go-pugleaf

    Thanks to everyone who responded to my inquiries regarding
teaching a course on methods in ecology.

    Here is a brief summary of the responses, and my own researches
into books.
Several books are available which emphasize statistical methods of
ecological analysis. They present basic statistical information and
information on performing statistical tests in an ecological context, but
remain largely based in a presentation of statistical methodology.

Scheiner, SM and Gurevitch, J. eds. 1993. Design and analysis of
ecological experiments. Chapman and Hall, NY. (an excellent introduction
to a variety of statistical techniques beyond the usual ones)

Underwood, AJ. 1997. Experiments in ecology. Cambridge University Press,
England.. (focussed on analysis of variance as the dominant model for
experimentation; an excellent treatment of hypothesis-generation and
testing, but solely within the context of anova designs).

Krebs, CJ. 1989. Ecological methodology. Harper and Row, NY. (not really a
statistics book; presents methodologies for population and community
ecology - mark-recapture, population size, niche overlap, etc.)

A couple of other books present "cook-book" descriptions of a wider range
of ecological field methods, again larger oriented towards population and
community ecology:

Brower, J. E., J. H. Zar, C. N. von Ende. 1989. Field and Laboratory
Methods for General Ecology. Wm. Brown, Publishers.

Cox, G. W. 1990. Laboratory Manual of General Ecology.  6th ed. WM C.
Brown, Publishers. Dubuque, IA.

Another book, Hairston, Nelson G. 1989. Ecological experiments: purpose,
design and execution. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, gives a more
descriptive analysis of experiments, from the point of view of major
organizing ideas in (again) community ecology.

    Aside from these, one has to go to books of methodologies more
specific to particular subdisciplines, like plant ecology, animal or
insect ecology, soils, landscape analysis, etc. I`ve started a
bibliography of such books for the class, and hope to have the students
expand it during the semester. I`d be happy to circulate it to anyone who
wants it. There do not seem to be books that cut across the hierarchy of
levels in ecology (from the physiological and behavioral to the ecosystem
and landscape). Thus, the choice of book or books depends very much on how
one conceptualizes "ecology" and what one wants to communicate to the
students.

    A couple of other books were mentioned by responders, but I have
not yet had the opportunity to look at them. They include:

Shrader-Frechette, K and E. McCoy. 1993. Method in Ecology. Cambridge
Univ. Press.

Hillborn and Mangel.? The Ecological Detective.

(plus specific books on pest ecology, modeling of populations, etc.)

    I hope this is of use to others teaching (or about to teach)
courses on ecological metho.

                            Joan Ehrenfeld
                            Rutgers University