Global Change and the Terrestrial Biosphere: Achievements and Challenges

by Herman H. Shugart, F.I. Woodward

Global climate change challenges ecologists to synthesize what we know to solve a problem with deep historical roots in our discipline.  In ecology, the question, “How do terrestrial ecosystems interact with the other earth systems to produce planetary change?” has sufficient depth to be the focal challenge. This central question is sharpened further as the changes that we may be manifesting upon our planet’s systems of land, sea, air and ice can have potential consequences for the future of human civilization.  This book provides the depth of the history of global ecology and reviews the breadth of the ideas being studied today. Each chapter starts with a brief narrative about a scientist whose work traces forward into today’s issues in global ecosystems. The discussions are framed in a growing realization that we may be altering the way our planet functions almost before we have gained the necessary knowledge of how it works at all.

216 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 7, 2010

About the author

Herman H. (Hank) Shugart
W.W. Corcoran Professor of Environmental Sciences & Director, Center for Regional Environmental Studies

Regions of Interest:
Global

Research:
Global change, systems ecology, systems analysis and modeling, forest ecosystem analysis and dynamics, ornithology.

Hank Shugart is a Highly Cited™ Scientist and 2006 University of Virginia Distinguished Scientist.

Hank is a systems ecologist whose primary research interests focus on the simulation modeling of forest ecosystems. He has developed and tested models of biogeochemical cycles, energy flow and secondary succession. In his most recent work, he uses computer models to simulate the growth, birth and death of each tree on small forest plots. The simulations describe changes in forest structure and composition over time, in response to both internal and external sources of perturbation. The models are applied at spatial scales ranging in size from small forest gaps to entire landscapes and at temporal scales of years to millennia.

Abstract: Herman H. ("Hank") Shugart, Jr. is the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Environmental Sciences and the Director of the Center for Regional Environmental Studies at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Georgia in 1971, and worked for the next 13 years in Tennessee -- eventually as a Senior Research Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and as a Professor in Botany and the Graduate Program in Ecology at the University of Tennessee. In 1984, he moved to his current position at University of Virginia. Dr. Shugart has also served as a Visiting Fellow in the Australian National University (1978-1979, 1993-1994), in Australia's Commonwealth Industrial and Scientific Research Organization, Division of Land Use Research (1982) and Division of Wildlife and Ecology (1993-1994), in the International Meteorological Institute at the University of Stockholm, Sweden (1984), and in the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria (1987,1989). He has served on the editorial board of several scholarly journals including Ecology and Ecological Monographs, Annual Reviews in Ecology and Systematics, Biological Conservation, Landscape Ecology, Journal of Vegetation Science, Forest Science, Global Change Biology and The Australian Journal of Botany. He is the author of more than 300 publications including 11 books, 60 book chapters and 90 papers in peer-reviewed journals.