Colin R. Townsend

I love ecology. It's a complex science that takes aspects of other sciences into consideration. As such, I have read a LOT of ecology-based books, including other textbooks. "Essentials of Ecology" is not a horrible text, but it is tired. Most examples are cliche but with the addition of statistics that our middle school audience sources left out. The language is bland, even for a textbook, and elaborations on examples are wordy and unclear. There is nothing unique to this book. However, if you don't have a strong interest in the topic and just need to get through a course, the book does touch on all basic concepts and supports those concepts with vague graphs (illustrates but would make a statistician gringe) and lists statistical values--this also means this book would have more meaning to someone who already took a college statistics course.

There are far more enlightening and readable ecology texts out there. If I didn't know that It'd give this book two stars.… (mehr)