This book presents the proceedings of a workshop on community ecology organized at Davis, in April, 1986, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation. There have been several recent symposia on community ecology (Strong et. al., 1984, Diamond and Case, 1987) which have covered a wide range of topics. The goal of the workshop at Davis was more narrow: to explore the role of scale in developing a theoretical approach to understanding communities. There are a number of aspects of scale that enter into attempts to understand ecological communities. One of the most basic is organizational scale. Should community ecology proceed by building up from population biology? This question and its ramifications are stressed throughout the book and explored in the first chapter by Simon Levin. Notions of scale have long been important in understanding physical systems. Thus, in understanding the interactions of organisms with their physical environment, questions of scale become paramount. These more physical questions illustrate the role scale plays in understanding ecology, and are discussed in chapter two by Akira Okubo.

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Pattern, Scale, and Variability: An Ecological Perspective.- Planktonic Micro-Communities in the Sea: biofluid mechanical view.- When Should You Include Age Structure.- Spatial Aspects of Species Interactions: the Wedding of Models and Experiments.- Interactions Between Environment and Competition: How Fluctuations Mediate Coexistence and Competitive Exclusion.- Untangling 'An Entangled Bank': Recent Facts and Theories About Community Food Webs.- The Geometry of Niches.- The Dynamics of Highly Aggregated Models of Whole Communities.