| Contents Notes |
"Ecologists are increasingly tackling difficult issues like global change, loss of biodiversity and sustainability of ecosystem services. These and related questions are enormously challenging requiring unprecedented multidisciplinary collaboration and rapid synthesis of large amounts of diverse data into information and ultimately knowledge." "This book addresses these issues providing a much needed resource for those involved in designing and implementing ecological research, as well as students who are entering the environmental sciences. The book stops short of a detailed treatment of data analysis, but does provide pointers to the relevant literature in graphics, statistics and knowledge discovery. The central thesis of the book is that high quality data management systems are critical for addressing future environmental challenges, requiring a new approach to how we conduct ecological research, one that views data as a resource and promotes stewardship, recycling and sharing of data." "Ecological Data will be particularly useful to those ecologists and information specialists that actively design, manage and analyze environmental databases, but will also benefit a wider audience of scientists and students in the ecological and environmental sciences."--Jacket. |
