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Piper: A Model Genus for Studies of Phytochemistry, Ecology, and Evolution

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Ted Floyd offers these comments:
The modern ecologist is tugged at by two opposing forces. On the one hand, there is the continued movement toward hyper-specialization-of sub-disciplines within the field of ecology, of different lab groups and research centers, of individual ecologists themselves. On the other hand, there are ever-increasing cries for an approach that emphasizes the search for principles and paradigms that are broadly applicable across multiple ecological systems.
Piper: A Model Genus confronts the conundrums of ecological balkanization and unification head-on. The scope of this volume is as broad as the field of ecology itself, with in-depth explorations of phenomena as varied as biogeography and chemical ecology, as seemingly unrelated as phylogenetics and ethnobotany. And the supporting cast of characters is highly diverse-everything from ants to earthworms, from spiders to fruit-eating bats. But the star attraction here is a single plant genus, itself a superb mesocosm for elucidating the regular, repeated patterns and processes that underlie so much of the variation in nature. One comes away from Piper with the satisfaction of knowing that we biologists can have our cake and eat it, too: Nature is wild and messy and complex, yet we can endeavor to make sense out of it all.