The pulse of life with the seasons is a classic theme of biology, equally cap­ turing every man's curiosity about early and late milestones of every year's cycle and the critical physiologist's inquiry into life's subtle signals and responses. Natural historians of ancient and renaissance time as well as today have charted the commonsense facts behind inspired traditions of poetry and practical rules for growing food and fiber. This volume brings together several ways of organizing the basic principles of phenology. These find order in the otherwise overwhelming mass of detail that captures our fleeting attention, like the daily newspaper, and then tends to fade into the overstuffed archives of history. Is this order so obvious and understandable that there is no longer any scien­ tific challenge to "phenology" as a tradition? Or does apparent simplicity mask a complex and ultimately baffling obstacle to the understanding of seasonality in even those few indicator plants and animals we know best, not to men­ tion the less known species or races making up the rest of each major land­ scape unit or ecosystem? Denying both these hasty opinions, we think that this volume well illustrates a range of questions and answers-from soundly established (but not trivial) doctrine to exciting inquiry about how ecosystems are organized.

Inhalt

1.1 Purposes of a Phenology Book.- 2.1 Plant Phenology Observation Networks.- 2.2 Phenology Gardens in Indiana.- 2.3 Phenology and Remote Sensing.- 2.4 Computer Mapping in Phonological Analysis.- 2.5 Phenology and Genecology of Woody Plants.- 3.1 Seasonality in Terrestrial Primary Producers.- 3.2 Seasonality of Nitrogen Fixation in Gulf Coast Salt Marshes.- 3.3 Phenology and Seasonal Modeling in Insects.- 3.4 Seasonality in Birds.- 3.5 Seasonality in Mammals.- 3.6 Seasonality of Decomposers.- 3.7 Seasonal Variations of Soil Fungi Isolated from the Rhizosphere of Liriodendron tulipifera L..- 3.8 Periods of Activity of Water Molds in a North Carolina Lake.- 4.1 Phenological Studies in Tundra.- 4.2 Phenological Studies in the Mojave Desert at Rock Valley (Nevada Test Site).- 4.3 Phenological Studies and Modeling in Grasslands.- 4.4 Phenodynamics of Production in a Mesic Deciduous Forest.- 4.5 Plant Development in Mediterranean Climates.- 4.6 Phenology of the Zambezian Woodland Area with Emphasis on the Miombo Ecosystem.- 4.7 Tropical Plant Phenology: Applications for Studies in Community Ecology.- 5.1 Modeling Seasonality.- 5.2 Modeling Important Phytophenological Events in Eastern North America.- 5.3 Modeling of the Annual Cycle of Soil Moisture.- 5.4 The Solar Thermal Unit Concept in Problems Related to Plant Development and Potential Evapotranspiration.- 6.1 Phenology in Agriculture.- 6.2 International Phenological Gardens in Europe: The Basic Network for International Phenological Observations.- 6.3 Genetic Variations in Some Phenological Characteristics of Forest Trees.- 6.4 Using Models of Seasonality.- 6.5 Periodicity and Seasonality of Airborne Algae and Protozoa.- 6.6 Seasonality of Airborne Fungi.- 6.7 Phenology and Environmental Education.- Species Index.