This book is an outgrowth of one phase of an upper-division course on
quantitative ecology, given each year for the past eight at Berkeley. I
am most grateful to the students in that course and to many graduate
students in the Berkeley Department of Zoology and Colleges of
Engineering and Natural Resources whose spirited discussions inspired
much of the book's content. I also am deeply grateful to those faculty
colleagues with whom, at one time or another, I have shared courses or
seminars in ecology or population biology, D.M. Auslander, L. Demetrius,
G. Oster, O.H. Paris, F.A. Pitelka, A.M. Schultz, Y. Takahashi, D.B.
Tyler, and P. Vogelhut, all of whom contributed substantially to the
development of my thinking in those fields, to my Depart- mental
colleagues E. Polak and A.J. Thomasian, who guided me into the litera-
ture on numerical methods and stochastic processes, and to the graduate
students who at one time or another have worked with me on
population-biology projects, L.M. Brodnax, S-P. Chan, A. Elterman, G.C.
Ferrell, D. Green, C. Hayashi, K-L. Lee, W.F. Martin Jr., D. May, J.
Stamnes, G.E. Swanson, and I. Weeks, who, together, undoubtedly provided
me with the greatest inspiration. I am indebted to the copy-editing and
production staff of Springer-Verlag, especially to Ms. M. Muzeniek, for
their diligence and skill, and to Mrs. Alice Peters, biomathematics
editor, for her patience.