This book represents the interests and attitudes, the information, and
the philosophy that define my work and career as it has evolved over the
years. Not written as a substitute for any of the many textbooks on
ecology, it is meant to present the simplest and most direct approach to
a complex field as distilled out of my work as an applied ecologist, who
deals with concrete daily problems in the real-world context of
economics, politics, and logis- tics. I hope that it is useful to the
reader who seeks an overview of applied ecology, including sufficient
specific detail to make that reader more com- fortable with the field
and more conversant with the capabilities and limits of ecologists and
their tools. Each chapter is followed by a bibliography which has two
functions. The first is to represent the main sources or reviews of
information upon which the associated chapter is partly based. The
second is to give sources for some of the examples utilized in the
chapter and some of the illustrations summarizing and clarifying the
text, which have been adapted, cited, or derived, from those references.
In that sense, I must most sincerely thank all those fellow ecologists
who have preceeded me and who have made my work far more diverse and
interesting to me than might otherwise have been the case.