A Dictionary of Ecology (Oxford Paperback Reference) [Paperback]

Michael Allaby (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2004 | Series: Oxford Paperback Reference

This dictionary provides authoritative and wide-ranging coverage of ecology and the environmental sciences. It is invaluable to students, professionals, and anyone with an interest in the natural world and our environment.

* 5,000 clear and concise entries

* Subjects include plant and animal physiology, animal behaviour, evolution, environmental pollution and conservation, climatology and meteorology, geomorphology, and oceanography

Editorial Reviews

Review

`Comprehensive coverage of ecology and the environmental sciences.' BBC Wildlife

About the Author

Michael Allaby has written many books on environmental science and especially on climatology and meteorology. These include the Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate; The Facts on File Weather and Climate Handbook; and the DK Guide to Weather. He is the General Editor of the Oxford Dictionaries of Zoology and Plant Sciences, and co-author of the Dictionary of Earth Sciences.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198609442
• ISBN-13: 978-0198609445
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,874,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice Companion Book, December 5, 2010

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nBee1 - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Dictionary of Ecology (Oxford Paperback Reference) (Paperback)

If there are some terms you can't quite recall, or a term you want to know and you are constantly exposed to several aspects of the field, it's a helpful companion book.

5 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Review of the 1998 2nd edition: comparison to EARTH SCIENCES, November 6, 2004

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Michele L. Worley (Kingdom of the Mouse, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Dictionary of Ecology (Oxford Paperback Reference) (Paperback)

Allaby is also a co-editor of the 2nd edition of A DICTIONARY OF EARTH SCIENCES, as well as General Editor of THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF NATURAL HISTORY. Where terms in this book's 2nd edition appear in the 2nd edition of A DICTIONARY OF EARTH SCIENCES (which came out a year later), the latter is to be preferred.

EARTH SCIENCES provides additional cross-references for various technical terms (e.g. classes of minerals) that the ECOLOGY dictionary doesn't contain. (ECOLOGY rarely seems to contain cross-references that EARTH SCIENCES does not.) Where the definitions are not identical (which is the most common occurrence when the terms appear in both books), the differences lie in the clarification of examples, the provision of additional details, rearrangement of the order of the information for greater clarity, and (where the word is used differently for non-ecological disciplines) the provision of additional alternate meanings.

In other words, Allaby incorporated the work done on this book into the DICTIONARY OF EARTH SCIENCES, and he and his co-editor on that book continued cleaning up and improving any terms used in common by the two books, taking care not to introduce silly inconsistencies.

When found in both sources, only one word out of a quasi-random selection of forty didn't match *any* of the senses listed in the DICTIONARY OF EARTH SCIENCES. However, out of 75 quasi-random terms in the DICTIONARY OF ECOLOGY, 35 weren't in the DICTIONARY OF EARTH SCIENCES, so unfortunately the DICTIONARY OF ECOLOGY can't be treated as a simple subset of the larger work.

Not surprisingly, the terms found in the ECOLOGY dictionary that aren't in the EARTH SCIENCES dictionary tend to be the more 'biological' terms, e.g. "saltatory" ('leaping movement, as of crickets or grasshoppers).