Marine ecology is more interdisciplinary, broader in scope, and more intimately linked to human activities than ever before. Ocean Ecology provides advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and practitioners with an integrated approach to marine ecology that reflects these new scientific realities, and prepares students for the challenges of studying and managing the ocean as a complex adaptive system. This authoritative and accessible textbook advances a framework based on interactions among four major features of marine ecosystems – geomorphology, the abiotic environment, biodiversity, and biogeochemistry – and shows how life is a driver of environmental conditions and dynamics. Ocean Ecology explains the ecological processes that link organismal to ecosystem scales and that shape the major types of ocean ecosystems, historically and in today's Anthropocene world.
J. Emmett Duffy is director of the Smithsonian Institution's Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network and MarineGEO program. He is the coeditor of Evolutionary Ecology of Social and Sexual Systems: Crustaceans as Model Organisms.
"There is no other book that provides such comprehensive coverage of the field of marine ecology and presents it in such a compelling way. Duffy makes evident that to understand marine systems in the Anthropocene requires a far better understanding of the overwhelming impact of humans on marine species and ecosystems."
– Mark Carr, University of California, Santa Cruz
"I would recommend – even require – this book for every graduate student working in marine ecology. Duffy provides a clear treatment of both the physical and biological aspects of how the ocean works while also incorporating the most rapidly acting current force: human impacts. There is no way for a marine ecology instructor to read this book and not incorporate its ideas, explanations, and graphics into their teaching."
– Jennifer Ruesink, University of Washington