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Book Review
| Transport Processes in Nature: Propagation of Ecological Influences Through Environmental Space. By William A. Reiners and Kenneth L. Driese. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xii+302 pp. Illustrations, references, index. Cloth $120.00, paper $60.00.
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| Transport processes are the means by which an event or condition in one location influences other locations. Although this is a simple concept, scientists often have failed to take transport processes and the patterns that influence them into account. There are a number of reasons for this conceptual shortfall, as Reiners and Driese point out in Chapter 1. Although the importance of transport processes has been recognized for a long time, dealing with spatial influences was difficult. So scientists often ignored them, and failed to communicate spatial concepts to others. The advent of geographic information systems, global positioning systems, remotely-sensed imagery, spatial statistics, and spatially explicit models now provide tools to measure scale and spatial influences, but concepts that integrate these measures with others gathered by scientists are only now being developed. For this reason, a book on spatial influences is timely and novel. |
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The authors describe two main objectives for the book: to introduce a conceptual framework for the study of the propagation of ecological influences, and to provide examples of models that describe influence propagation, organized by particular vectors including colluvial (gravitational) transport, wind, fire, water, animals, and others. |
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The description of the conceptual framework, and the most valuable part of the book, begins in Chapter 2 with a careful presentation of definitions. This section elaborates a general conceptual model for the propagation of influences via 1) causal agents of propagation, 2) the entities propagated, 3) the vectors of propagation, and 4) the consequences of propagation. Unfortunately, feedbacks go conspicuously undiscussed. Following this there are chapters on how scientists view and conceptualize nature (Chapter 3) and how GIS may be used to represent a spatial view of nature needed to examine transport processes (Chapter 4). The next nine chapters each summarize the operation and behavior of different vectors and how they have been modeled. A companion CD includes ESRI ArcView-based programs that illustrate models. |
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Although the writing was good, there were several elements that made the manuscript less readable, including many long lists of comma-separated nouns or phrases in sentences and inadequate figure captions. Although the breadth of topics addressed in this book is impressive, there is too much detail and review at the expense of integration and synthesis. It would have been more effective to use the general conceptual model as a basis for describing the commonalities in different systems in subsequent chapters. Additionally, the piecemeal treatment of vectors precludes an examination of how vectors interact to structure real-world ecological systems (for example, the role of livestock movements, wind, and water erosion on vegetation change). A concluding chapter that ties the processes together is especially lacking. |
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This book is accessible to a broad audience: ecologists may find the introductory material to be basic. Environmental historians would be particularly interested in the first part of this book as it describes the context within which the study of spatial influences has evolved. Despite its synthetic shortcomings, this book uniquely describes the breadth of spatial-ecological processes that will be integrated in the continued development of landscape ecology. |
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Brandon Bestelmeyer is an ecologist working with Jornada Experimental Range and the Jornada Long-Term Ecological Research site at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. His research is focused on explaining the resilience of desert grasslands as influenced by soils and geomorphology, landscape context, and the effects of transport processes. |
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