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This introductory chapter focuses on the application of ecological techniques in forest conservation and management. It presents a brief overview of recent developments in international forest policy. It also includes a summary of recent initiatives aimed at providing conservation assessments of forests.

This chapter begins by outlining important advances in the science of ecology. These include the fundamental recognition that ecological systems are not steady state, but instead vary over time and space. However, ecological research has failed in many ways, mainly because of the failure of ecologists to settle upon central questions. The relationship between basic and applied ecological research is discussed and it is argued that we need to eliminate the idea that basic science always precedes applications.

The IBP served to incorporate ecosystem ecology, and this resulted in a permanent increase in funding support for the field. The IBP led to the creation of numerous smaller-scale models of ecological systems and trained a generation of ecological researchers by pioneering the use of computer modeling in ecology. The successor programs to the IBP are now integral to the Long-Term Ecological Research program (LTER) which is now in its thirtieth year and includes five former IBP sites, with Hubbard Brook among the twenty-six research programs. This chapter describes the development of the LTER program and then presents an overview of some of the key players in its development, including NSF program staff and the Coordinating Committee chairs who have been active in this program. Major scientific findings are also presented here, and some comparisons are made with the predecessor of the LTER, the IBP. Additional synthesis activities, such as the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) are also discussed.

This chapter describes how the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Systems (NCEAS) originated, and analyses the network patterns and social processes involved in research projects undertaken at the centre. It finds that the NCEAS has successfully adapted to changes in the culture and techniques involved in ecological research. NCEAS staff primarily focuses on providing technical support of computers and analytic software to researchers without directly engaging in scientific research projects. The NCEAS was primarily established as an organization intended to adapt to the changes occurring within the environment. It has emerged as the prime destination for scientists and environmental decision makers from different disciplines and institutions to gather, interact with each other, and apply analytical and modeling tools to data sets sourced from different sites.

This chapter illustrates the contributions of the Long-Term Ecological Research to the growing awareness of the management of Puerto Rican government in conserving Luquillo Mountains' ecosystem. It also highlights the activities in the Luquillo Experimental Forest (LEF) by addressing the tropical forest conservation issues and relating these to the recurring disturbances experienced by the locality. Finally, it outlines the application of the research to test the accumulated ecological information in anticipating future needs and priorities.

The focus of the chapter is plant ecological and agro-ecological research in colonial Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), from the Great Depression to the beginning of the so called “Second Colonial Occupation”. Colonial ecological research contributed to and was structured by the narrative of an impending social and ecological breakdown of “native” subsistence communities triggered by the impact of colonialism: the unintended consequences of Pax Britannica, the introduction of a capitalist economy, the creation of reserves. Ecology held the promise of not only helping to come to grips with these complexities, but of serving as a science of planning, opening up the possibility of successfully steering a course between the Scylla of social and ecological breakdown and the Charybdis of stagnation and low productivity. Northern Rhodesia – then still a backwater to the Empire – consequently became one of the hot spots for the testing out of ecological research methods.

This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges of citizen science as a tool for undertaking ecological research. Before assessing the potential for large-scale citizen science to advance our understanding of ecological systems, the chapter considers the types of ecological research questions for which the scale (extent and resolution) of data from citizen science is particularly suitable. It then provides examples that illustrate how citizen science data can elucidate some of the processes relating to ecology, such as the underlying patterns of an organism's distribution and abundance as well as its life history and behavior. It also outlines research considerations that must be taken into account when designing (or continuing) citizen science projects.

This chapter focuses on the ecological response mechanisms of the Luquillo Mountains to natural and human-induced disturbances, such as hurricanes and land cover change. It identifies the ecosystems of the Luquillo Mountains as a perfect representation of large masses of a non-frost tropical land because of its naturally occurring features: high rainfall, hurricane disturbances, maritime climate, and insularity. It then sets out the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program as a by-product of the 20th and 21st century experimentations, and discusses its contributions to the basic understanding of the ecological make-up and biogeochemistry of the Luquillo Mountains.

This chapter focuses on the Gulf of Nicoya estuary located in the northwestern part of the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. It discusses the main physical, chemical, and biological features of the estuary. It also discusses some control initiatives for the rational use and the protection of resources in the Gulf of Nicoya, including the reduction of habitat destruction, and control of pollution sources, and support for environmental education and ecological research.

This chapter discusses how ecology and ecological communities affect both the life-history and evolution of the parasite and the host. Ecological communities consist of populations of different species. Community ecology is an active area of ecological research that makes inquiries such as: what processes might be responsible for the coexistence, or mutual exclusion of species, and how can the number of species and the diversity of a community be explained? The chapter goes into the ecological communities of parasites, or parasite ecology, which have equivalent properties to those of hosts. The difference, however, is that only hosts represent a suitable environment for a parasite. The chapter looks at the characteristics of parasite communities, such as the ‘compound parasite community’, which is the community of all parasites in a given ecosystem.

Niche construction refers to a process by which organisms modify the abiotic and biotic features of their environments. This chapter discusses problems of accepting the phenomenon of niche construction in biodiversity research. It argues that the explicit incorporation of the niche construction perspective into empirical ecological research can provide insights to the complex patterns of spatial and temporal ecological changes.

This chapter explores the effects of the organismal diversity to the disturbance sequences that indirectly affects their milieu—the ecosystem. It explains the scientific investigations conducted by the ecologists on the distribution and abundance of organisms, particularly the cycle of nutrients in the food web. It also discusses the flora and fauna's body make-up and nutritional in-take. In this regard, this chapter provides a purview of the connection between biodiversity variations and ecological processes through the following environmental projects: Rain Forest Project and Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER).

Chapter “Introduction to environmental DNA (eDNA)” defines the central concepts of this book. Environmental DNA (eDNA) corresponds to a mixture of genomic DNA from many different organisms found in an environmental sample such as water, soil, or feces. DNA metabarcoding can be defined as the simultaneous DNA-based identification of many taxa found in the same eDNA extract. It is usually based on the analysis of a metabarcode (i.e., a short and taxonomically informative DNA region). Metagenomics refers to the assembly and functional analysis of the different genomes found in an environmental sample, while metatranscriptomics examines gene expression and regulation at the sampling time based on the set of RNAs extracted from such a sample. Chapter also presents a brief history of eDNA, highlights the different steps of an eDNA study, and gives an overview of the different eDNA methods implemented in ecological research or biodiversity management.

This chapter examines the role of Wytham Woods in the field of ecological research. It describes the area's role in helping to understand how ecology works at the medium to large landscape scale. It emphasizes on how the Wytham landscape provides a test bed for researchers in finding out how would species might thrive in a changing environment. It briefly looks first into the woodland distribution in Oxfordshire, and explains the basis of retaining and managing ‘ancient’ woodlands. It describes the biological diversity of the woodlands, and studies the grasslands and fens located in Wytham. It also highlights the numerous species' movement between patches within the Wytham Woods and the changes in the relationship between Wytham and its surroundings.