bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ernest Hemingway
Authors: Kosiba Sara
Published: March 2013

Ernest Hemingway (b. 1899–d. 1961) was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and spent his formative years there. In addition he spent summers with his family in northern Michigan, a setting that later became the focus of much of his fiction. Hemingway’s search for knowledge and adventure after high school led him to a brief job reporting for the Kansas City Star, and in 1918, during World War I, he enlisted in the American Red Cross. He was wounded in Italy a few months after enlisting and returned to Oak Park profoundly influenced by the experience. In 1921 Hemingway returned to Europe, where he served as a roving correspondent for the Toronto Star and began to refine his craft as a writer with two collections of stories published by Parisian presses. His first American publication was In Our Time (1925), a series of stories and vignettes based on his experiences of northern Michigan and his reporting and travels. The Torrents of Spring (1926), a Michigan-based story and parody of the work of Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein, was a symbol of Hemingway’s break with his mentors and with his initial publisher, Boni and Liveright. All of Hemingway’s major work from that point on was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he formed a famous friendship with the editor Maxwell Perkins. Hemingway’s career took off with the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926), an insightful portrayal of American expatriate life in Europe in the 1920s and one of the first books to show his strong interest in the Spanish bullfighting tradition. A Farewell to Arms (1929), based in part on Hemingway’s own World War I experiences in Italy, became a best seller and helped cement his name in the literary world. Several other novels followed: To Have and Have Not (1937); his Key West novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which used material from the Spanish Civil War; and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), set in Italy after World War II. In 1952 The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His prolific literary contributions also include collections of short stories, many of which have appeared in anthologies and textbooks. He also published nonfiction, memoirs, and essays, often about hunting, fishing, and bullfighting, all activities long associated with Hemingway’s life and career. His literary career continued to expand even after his death, with several of his manuscripts adapted into posthumous publications, including A Moveable Feast (1964, revised edition 2009), his memoir of Paris in the 1920s.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Authors: Vetter Lara
Published: March 2013

H.D. (b. 1886–d. 1961) was an American modernist writer whose career spanned over five decades. Born Hilda Doolittle in the tight-knit Moravian community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, H.D. was the daughter of a noted astronomer, Charles Doolittle, and a Moravian musician and artist, Helen Wolle Doolittle. When she was a child her family moved to Philadelphia, a city home to a number of figures who would also become major American modernists—Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams—and H.D. knew them well. As a young adult, however, she left the United States for Europe, spending the rest of her life in London, England, and Switzerland. One of the first writers of English vers libre, H.D. began her career as a founding member of imagism, a short-lived but highly influential aesthetic movement that eschewed 19th-century sentimentalism for stripped down, objective verse that broke with conventional poetic form. She continued to write poetry, evolving into a writer of epic verse in her later years. She was also a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction prose, a translator of ancient Greek, and, briefly, a filmmaker and actor. Briefly engaged to Ezra Pound, married for a time to Richard Aldington, and bearing a child (Perdita) by the musician Cecil Gray, H.D. had romantic relationships with men and women, the longest and most significant with Winifred “Bryher” Ellerman, daughter of a wealthy English entrepreneur. H.D. survived and chronicled both world wars—the first in a flat in London’s Bloomsbury, the second in South Kensington—and the destructiveness of militarism and war is a constant theme throughout her life’s work. She also saw renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud as a student and analysand in 1933 and 1934, and her work draws on, and struggles to reenvision, his insights about the unconscious. Freud dubbed her the “perfect bi[sexual],” and her writing unwaveringly attends to gender and sexual politics. She is also known for her esotericism, her lifelong and intensive study of alternative forms of spirituality, as a way to imagine healing a broken 20th-century world. It is this facet of her work that has drawn the attention of 20th-century poets such as Robert Duncan. The first female recipient of the Award of Merit Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, H.D. was central to the origins of modernist poetry, and the number of renowned 20th- and 21st-century poets who cite her influence—including Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov—is a testament to how her writings still resonate today.
James Weldon Johnson
Authors: Nowlin Michael
Published: March 2013

James Weldon Johnson (b. 1871–d. 1938) was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. After graduating with a BA from Atlanta University, he became principal of his former grammar school, established the first daily newspaper for Jacksonville’s African American population, and gained admission to the Florida bar. With his brother, the musician J. Rosamond Johnson, he also wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a commencement ceremony (in 1900), and it eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” He joined his brother in New York in 1902 to launch a successful songwriting team with Bob Cole. Johnson gave up show business in 1906 to become US Consulate, first in Venezuela, then Nicaragua, where he completed his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. In 1914 he moved to Harlem with his wife Grace Nail Johnson (whom he married in 1910). He began writing editorials on a range of subjects for the New York Age, a nationally circulating African American newspaper, and in 1915 he joined the recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became secretary of the organization in 1920 and remained so until 1930. Fifty Years and Other Poems, his first collection, was published in 1917. In 1922 he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first anthology of its kind, and established himself as a pioneering theorist of African American poetics and a guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson modeled his poetic ideas in the 1927 volume God’s Trombones, which appeared in the same year he reissued The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man under his name. In 1929, a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship enabled him to devote a year to writing, which resulted in Black Manhattan, a history of African Americans in New York. From 1930 onward, Johnson taught creative writing and African American literature at Fisk University as well as New York University. His 1933 autobiography Along This Way was widely acclaimed, and he collected both new and old poems in the 1935 volume St. Peter Relates an Incident. When he died in a car accident in 1938, Johnson was one of the most honored and respected African Americans in the United States, recognized at once as a man of letters, an advocate of black America’s cultural achievements, and a tireless political opponent of America’s Jim Crow system.
Ellen Glasgow
Authors: Rainwater Catherine
Published: March 2013

Ellen Glasgow (b. 1873–d. 1945) was born in Richmond, Virginia. She enjoyed a career spanning nearly half a century as the author of poetry, short stories, novels, and nonfiction. The majority of her nineteen novels are set in Virginia, where she grew up as the ninth of ten children born to a severe, Calvinist father and a mild-mannered, Episcopalian mother who died when Ellen was twenty. A variety of emotional and intellectual conflicts traceable back to childhood trauma, especially the untimely loss of her mother, are reflected in her writing. At twenty Glasgow also began to suffer from hearing loss; from then on increasing deafness interfered with her social life. As a young child Glasgow refused to attend school owing to shyness, but she became impressively self-educated and was a voluminous reader. Her first novel, The Descendant (1897), examines political and philosophical issues that engaged her throughout her life. Although she wrote about the South, she objected vigorously to being labeled a regionalist. Repeatedly, she sought recognition as a modernist, and indeed her works explore epistemological questions concerning personal identity, history, and artistic expression from a markedly 20th-century perspective. Among writers she most admired were Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy. With Hardy she shared a great compassion for animals that is reflected in her fiction. For twenty years she served as president of the Richmond Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Her best-known novels are Virginia (1913), Barren Ground (1925), The Sheltered Life (1932), and Vein of Iron (1935). She also published a collection of poems, a volume of short stories, an autobiography (The Woman Within, 1954), a book of literary critical statements, and miscellaneous nonfiction pieces in newspapers and magazines. Glasgow traveled widely throughout her life, but she always returned to her family home at 1 West Main, where she did most of her writing. Her house—restored and maintained to appear as it did when she lived there—is open to visitors in Richmond. Founded in Richmond in 1974, the Ellen Glasgow Society has maintained steady membership that includes both academics and a lay readership.
Jonathan Edwards
Authors: Minkema Kenneth P.
Published: March 2013

Jonathan Edwards (b. 1703–d. 1758) was a pastor, educator, missionary, theologian, and philosopher, born in East Windsor, Connecticut, who ministered in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards oversaw two periods of “awakening,” or widespread religious concern, and became known internationally as a supporter and observer of the revivals. It was in 1741, during the series of revivals known as the “Great Awakening,” that he preached the sermon for which he has earned fame, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. He produced a number of important analyses of the movement, including Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival (1743), A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), and An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer (1747), as well as The Life of David Brainerd (1749), a life of the zealous young missionary who died of tuberculosis in Edwards’s home. Despite his fame, he and his congregation were increasingly alienated, and he was dismissed in 1750 over a disagreement concerning the qualifications for church admission. From there he assumed the post as missionary to the Mahicans (or Mohicans) and Mohawks at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he also wrote the treatises that secured his reputation as one of the most significant philosophical theologians of his time, Freedom on Will (1754), The End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue (completed 1753–1754, published 1765), and Original Sin (1758). Edwards is considered the most original and influential Protestant theologian to come from America, as well as one of its most important figures in the history of religion, and his legacy around the globe is profound. Even so, his slave-owning, his defense of slavery as a biblically ordained institution, and his part in the dispossession of Native Americans are causing reappraisals. The titles listed in this article provide an entrée into the vast literature on Edwards, especially the more recent literature. Titles are grouped under headings, though readers should be aware that many works address different topics and disciplines.
Willa Cather
Authors: Funda Evelyn
Published: March 2013

Born in Virginia, Willa Cather (b. 1873–d. 1947) and her family moved to a homestead in Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was nine. After a precocious childhood, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1890. Originally a pre-med major, Cather soon changed to an English major and began to regularly contribute theater and book reviews to the local newspaper. After graduating, she moved to Pittsburgh to edit a women’s magazine, in which many of her essays and early fiction appeared under pseudonyms. Later, after a stint teaching high school English, she took a job as managing editor for the muckraking McClure’s magazine in New York City and became the most powerful woman in magazine publishing at the time. There she met Edith Lewis, who would be her partner for nearly forty years. After five years at the magazine, during which she published a collection of poetry (April Twilights in 1903) and another of short stories (The Troll Garden in 1905), Cather devoted herself to writing full-time. Her first novel was Alexander’s Bridge (1912), a novel patterned after Henry James. However, Cather soon realized that she would have greater success writing about the kind of people she had grown up with on the Great Plains, and in 1913 she published O Pioneers!, which was about immigrant efforts to homestead in Nebraska. With this novel, Cather laid claim to the American West as a key setting for her fiction. Her next novel, the autobiographically influenced The Song of the Lark (1915), focused on the rise of an opera star from a provincial hometown that resembles Red Cloud. My Ántonia (1918), which was about a boy who meets a Bohemian immigrant girl in Nebraska, was a critical success. Her World War I novel One of Ours (1922) earned the Pulitzer Prize and began a decade of Cather’s greatest successes, including A Lost Lady (1923), and two novels that moved away from the Nebraska landscape for which Cather had become known. The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) were substantially set in the American Southwest. Later fiction moved farther afield. Shadows on the Rock (1930) is a pioneering story set in 17th-century Quebec, while Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) portrays the final years of slavery in the Virginia valley where Cather had been born. By the time she died in New York City in 1947, Cather had published a total of twelve novels, three short-stories collections, a poetry collection, a collection of nonfiction essays, and two other nonfiction books that she ghostwrote (the biography of Mary Baker Eddy and the autobiography of her former boss, Sam McClure).
Katherine Anne Porter
Authors: Unrue Darlene Harbour , Grogan Christine
Published: March 2013

Katherine Anne Porter (b. 1890–d. 1980), christened Callie Russell Porter, was born in Indian Creek, Texas, and spent her formative years in Kyle, Texas, with her paternal grandmother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter. After the death of her grandmother in 1901, Callie spent a few months at a convent school in New Orleans and a year at the private Thomas School in San Antonio, where she expanded her reading and began her serious writing. At age fourteen she informally changed her name to Katherine Porter, and at age sixteen she married John Henry Koontz, converting to Roman Catholicism and continuing to read voraciously and write poems and stories. By the time she divorced Koontz in 1915 (legally changing her name from Katherine Koontz to Katherine Porter), she had only two negligible publications. During the next four years, she married and divorced a second and third time, spent months in tuberculosis sanatoria, began to call herself Katherine Anne Porter, nearly died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, launched a journalistic apprenticeship, and in 1919 moved to Greenwich Village. In 1920, however, she was drawn to Mexico, where her mature creative force was loosed, and she began to publish the stories that would make her fame with their appearance in 1930 as the limited edition of six stories titled Flowering Judas. In the 1930s through the 1950s, Porter continued to publish critically acclaimed short novels and short stories as well as nonfiction, important collections appearing as Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935), Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1939), The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), and The Days Before (1952); worked on her evolving long novel, Ship of Fools (1962); married and divorced two final times; received numerous awards and honorary degrees; and found financial support in fellowships, speaking engagements, a stint in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, academic appointments, and residencies at the artist colony Yaddo. With the publication of Ship of Fools Porter became wealthy, but her creative vein was exhausted. During the remainder of her life she published only works she had written earlier, most notably The Collected Stories (1965), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (1970), and The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), her memoir about the Sacco-Vanzetti protests of 1927. By the time she died in 1980 she had been recognized as one of the important voices in American modernism.
Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience
Authors: Fabrigar Leandre R. , Norris Meghan E. , Fowlie Devin
Published: March 2013

Social influence refers to the ways people influence the beliefs, feelings, and behaviors of others. Each day we are bombarded by countless attempts by others to influence us, and as such, the study of social influence has long been a central topic of inquiry for social psychologists and researchers in many other social sciences (e.g., marketing, organizational behavior, political science). Theorists have typically distinguished between four types of social influence. Compliance is when an individual changes his or her behavior in response to an explicit or implicit request made by another person. Compliance is often referred to as an active form of social influence in that it is usually intentionally initiated by a person. It is also conceptualized as an external form of social influence in that its focus is a change in overt behavior. Although compliance may sometimes occur as a result of changes in people’s internal beliefs and/or feelings, such internal changes are not the primary goal of compliance, nor are they necessarily required for the request to be successful. In contrast, conformity refers to when people adjust their behaviors, attitudes, feelings, and/or beliefs to fit to a group norm. Conformity is generally regarded as a passive form of influence in that members of the group do not necessarily actively attempt to influence others. People merely observe the actions of group members and adjust their behaviors and/or views accordingly. The focus of conformity can be either external (overt behaviors) or internal (beliefs and feelings) in nature. Obedience is a change in behavior as a result of a direct command from an authority figure. Obedience is an active form of influence in that it is usually directly initiated by an authority figure and is typically external in that overt behaviors are generally the focus of commands. The final form of social influence is persuasion, which refers to an active attempt to change another person’s attitudes, beliefs, or feelings, usually via some form of communication. Persuasion is an active form of influence and is internal in its focus in that changes in people’s beliefs and/or feelings are the goal of such influence. Typically, persuasion is treated as a distinct literature from that of the other three forms of social influence and is usually included as a major area of inquiry within the broader attitudes literature. As such, this article will focus primarily on literature related to compliance, conformity, and obedience.
Factor Analysis
Authors: Porter Ronald D. , Fabrigar Leandre R.
Published: March 2013

Factor analysis is a term used to refer to a set of statistical procedures designed to determine the number of distinct unobservable constructs needed to account for the pattern of correlations among a set of measures. These unobservable constructs that explain the pattern of correlations among measures are referred to as common factors. The statistical procedures comprising factor analysis provide information regarding the number of common factors underlying a set of measures as well estimates of the strength and direction of influence of each of the factors on each of the measures. These estimates of influence are referred to as factor loadings. In cases where there is a lack of clear expectations regarding the number and nature of the factors likely to underlie a set of measures, procedures exist to conduct exploratory factor analysis (EFA) or unrestricted factor analysis. In this bibliography, we will primarily focus on these exploratory procedures. In cases in which a researcher can make clear predictions regarding the number of factors and the specific measures each factor will influence, procedures are available to conduct confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) or restricted factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis is typically covered in reviews of structural equation modeling, and thus we will draw upon references from CFA only when they have direct relevance to EFA.
Stereotypes
Authors: Careem Akeela , Jussim Lee , Rubinstein Rachel
Published: March 2013

Stereotypes represent a broad and general topic in psychology and other social sciences. The bulk of the theorizing and empirical data on stereotypes, however, comes from social psychology. As this annotated bibliography will show, there is widespread disagreement in emphasis, tone, and even data regarding the extent to which stereotypes are inaccurate, irrational, and a source or result of prejudice and discrimination. Stereotypes (the contents of people’s beliefs about groups) and stereotyping (the processes by which people—consciously or not—use their stereotypes to make sense of the world) have been studied by social psychologists for almost a century, and they remain hot topics. Although laypeople often seem to use the terms “stereotype,” “prejudice,” and “discrimination” nearly synonymously, social psychologists draw significant distinctions between each concept. Stereotypes are usually defined as beliefs about groups, prejudice as evaluation of or attitude toward a group, and discrimination as behavior that systematically advantages or disadvantages a group. This article focuses on stereotypes.
Five-Factor Model of Personality
Authors: Soto Christopher J. , Jackson Joshua J.
Published: March 2013

The five-factor model of personality (FFM) is a set of five broad trait dimensions or domains, often referred to as the “Big Five”: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism (sometimes named by its polar opposite, Emotional Stability), and Openness to Experience (sometimes named Intellect). Highly extraverted individuals are assertive and sociable, rather than quiet and reserved. Agreeable individuals are cooperative and polite, rather than antagonistic and rude. Conscientious individuals are task focused and orderly, rather than distractible and disorganized. Neurotic individuals are prone to experiencing negative emotions, such as anxiety, depression, and irritation, rather than being emotionally resilient. Finally, highly open individuals have a broad rather than narrow range of interests, are sensitive rather than indifferent to art and beauty, and prefer novelty to routine. The Big Five/FFM was developed to represent as much of the variability in individuals’ personalities as possible, using only a small set of trait dimensions. Many personality psychologists agree that its five domains capture the most important, basic individual differences in personality traits and that many alternative trait models can be conceptualized in terms of the Big Five/FFM structure. The goal of this article is to reference, organize, and comment on a variety of classic and contemporary papers related to the Big Five/FFM. This article begins with papers that introduce the Big Five/FFM structure, approach it from different theoretical perspectives, and consider possible objections to it (General Overviews, Theoretical Perspectives, and Critiques). Next, it discusses papers providing evidence for the Big Five/FFM as a model of basic trait structure (Big Five/FFM Structure). Third, the article considers hierarchical trait models that propose even broader personality dimensions “above” the Big Five, or more-specific traits “beneath” the Big Five (Big Five/FFM in Hierarchical Context). Fourth, it references a series of handbook chapters that each considers an individual Big Five domain in depth (Individual Domains). Fifth, it references several widely used Big Five/FFM measures as well as papers examining the accuracy of Big Five self-reports and observer-reports (Measurement). Sixth, the article discusses the biological and social origins of the Big Five (Biological and Social Bases). Seventh, the article considers stability and change in the Big Five across the life span as well as the developmental mechanisms underlying stability and change (Development). Finally, this article cites evidence that the Big Five influences a variety of important behaviors and life outcomes, from political attitudes to psychopathology (Predicting Behaviors and Life Outcomes).
Succession
Authors: Gibson David J.
Published: March 2013

In the field of ecology, the study of succession enjoys a fairly long history, certainly as long as ecology has been recognized as a discipline. Succession was discussed unofficially as early as the nineteenth century, but the term as we understand it today did not appear until the turn of the twentieth century (see History). Succession remains a core tenet within ecology, although it is sometimes subsumed with the broader discussion of vegetation dynamics. The early view that succession is a deterministic, predictable process has changed as ecologists now better appreciate the hierarchical, nonequilibrial nature of communities and ecosystems. Primary research has moved on from simply describing the patterns of primary and secondary successional change. Today’s debates are dominated by the search for a mechanistic understanding and the application of successional theory for ecosystem management, rehabilitation, and restoration. The readings included in this bibliography on issues related to succession include the history of successional studies, primary and secondary succession, successional theory, and applications.
Ordination Analysis
Authors: Gibson David J.
Published: March 2013

Ordination is a method for reducing dimensions of multivariate data. Inference on high-dimensional data can be challenging, and reducing dimensions can make it more approachable. In biology, the lower-dimensional space is visually represented in an ordination diagram. Such a visualization allows the discussion of patterns in the distribution of samples and species or of other units under study. In community ecology ordination allows hypotheses to be generated, and tested, about the potential relationship between composition of an ecological community at a site and characteristics of the environment. Sparse data sets with few observations are a common occurrence in community ecology, and ordination helps to reduce the information burden of the analysis. Since its introduction in the ecological literature in the early 1950s, ecologists have embraced several approaches to ordination analysis, which are listed here.
Temperate Deciduous Forests
Authors: Gilliam Frank S.
Published: March 2013

Given the global distribution of human populations and their coincidence with temperate deciduous forests, it is likely that when most people consider the term “forest,” what comes to mind most frequently is the temperate deciduous forest biome. Although not to the level of their tropical counterparts, temperate deciduous forests typically display high plant biodiversity and rates of net primary productivity. They contrast sharply, however, with tropical forests in the distribution of biodiversity and productivity. In tropical forests, greatest plant diversity is associated with the vegetation of greatest productivity—trees. By contrast, the greatest plant diversity—up to 90 percent—in temperate deciduous forests occurs among the plants of least physical stature: the herbaceous species. Given the close association between these forests and their use by human populations, whether for food, fiber, habitat, or recreation, it is not surprising that they have been well studied, particularly in North America, and thus have a rich literature going back many years. However, for the very reason of that intensive use, temperate deciduous forests have proved to be an ecological moving target, as timber harvesting, air pollution, and introduced pests (e.g., insects and parasites) have represented a chronic assault on the structure and function of these ecosystems.
Mycorrhizal Ecology
Authors: Ji Baoming , Bever James D.
Published: March 2013

Mycorrhizae are ubiquitous in terrestrial ecosystems. With an increasing awareness that this symbiotic association plays important roles in plant population dynamics, community structures and ecosystem functioning, mycorrhizal ecology has emerged as a fast growing subdiscipline in the field of ecology. Over recent decades, studies have expanded from descriptions of basic mycorrhizal biology to investigations of their functional relevance in a broader ecological context. Today’s research is dominated by the search for underlying mechanisms and general principles. The readings on issues related to mycorrhizal ecology include basic overviews of mycorrhizal studies, classification and species diversity, methodology in mycorrhizal examination, costs and benefits, population and community ecology of mycorrhizae, their ecological significance in plant community and ecosystem, multitrophic interactions, and practical applications. This bibliography focuses on the most widespread and ecologically important types of mycorrhizae—arbuscular mycorrhizae and ectomycorrhizae.
Coral Reefs
Authors: Knowlton Nancy
Published: March 2013

Coral reefs are the most diverse of marine ecosystems, with hundreds of thousands if not millions of species associated with reefs. For this reason they are often called the rain forests of the sea, and as such they have been of interest not only to marine scientists but also to ecologists and evolutionary biologists broadly. The center of reef diversity is the Indo-West Pacific, especially the “coral triangle,” comprised of the island-rich waters of Southeast Asia (e.g., Indonesia and the Philippines). The next most extensive area of reef building and reef diversity is in the tropical western Atlantic. In the early 21st century most reefs are built primarily by stony corals in the order Scleractinia (phylum Cnidaria, class Anthozoa), but large stony structures have in the past been built by microbes, clams, and other organisms. Coral reefs are dynamic structures that are constantly being both built by the skeletons of corals and other organisms, on the one hand, and broken down into rubble and sand, on the other. The ability of corals to outpace the destructive forces of storms and bioeroders is due to their symbiosis with single-celled algal symbionts in their tissues. These zooxanthellae (a diverse group of dinoflagellates once thought to be a single species) transfer some of the products of their photosynthesis to their coral hosts, which in return provide the zooxanthellae with nutrients. Also like rain forests, coral reef ecosystems are highly threatened around the world, and many have been substantially affected by humans for centuries. Local impacts, such as habitat destruction, overfishing, pollution, and invasive species, have been joined by the global impacts of ocean warming and acidification. The result has been that many coral reefs have been taken over by macroalgae or other space occupiers that grow faster than corals and are less sensitive to stressors associated with human activities. Coral disease, which is increasing due to warming and pollution, and coral bleaching, caused primarily by ocean warming, are now important causes of coral mortality. Overall, about one-half of all living coral may already have been lost, and one-third of all coral species are now deemed to be at risk of extinction; this places them on par with the most endangered terrestrial organisms. Because carbon dioxide emissions are continuing to rise, the best hopes in the short term for conserving and restoring coral reefs involve reducing local stressors. Measures to improve water quality and reduce overfishing (particularly of herbivores) are critical components of coral reef management strategies. However, reducing carbon dioxide emissions will be essential for the long-term survival of coral reefs.
Fire Ecology
Authors: Parminter John
Published: March 2013

Abiotic natural disturbance agents include wildfire, wind, landslides, snow avalanches, volcanoes, flooding, and other weather-related phenomena. Fire is of particular interest because of its antiquity, its natural role in many terrestrial ecosystems, its long-term use by humans to modify vegetation, and its potentially serious threat to life and property. Fire ecology is the art and science of understanding natural and human fire history and fire effects on the environment, species, ecosystems, and landscapes. This knowledge aids the development of fire and ecosystem management plans and activities. Fire history is determined by a number of techniques that use available physical or cultural evidence to examine particular temporal and spatial scales. Fire effects on the environment and organisms are determined by observation and experimentation, but the findings are variable and often contradictory. Fire regimes are used to characterize the role of fire in specific ecosystems and can help guide ecosystem restoration activities. Attitudes toward fire have evolved over time, as good and bad experiences combined with improved scientific understanding to influence our perspectives. Natural disturbances came to be viewed as integral parts of ecosystems rather than external perturbations. We now strive to allow fire to maintain its natural role in wilderness areas and parks and also to emulate natural disturbances, such as fire, when designing forest harvesting operations. This article focuses on how and what we know about fire’s history, its effects on different components of the environment, its role in specific vegetation types, and its relationship with human culture.
Grassland Biome
Authors: Gibson David J.
Published: March 2013

Grassland is the most extensive terrestrial biome, occupying 41–56 ×; 106 km2, or 31–43 percent of Earth’s surface (see White, et al. 2000 and World Resources Institute 2000, both cited under Grassland Extent and Loss; World Resources Institute 2000 is also cited under Ecosystem Services). Grasslands have been heavily used throughout human history, especially as a food source and for livestock. As a result, 39 to 90 percent of grassland has been converted to cropland or urban area, with only 1 hectare of grassland protected for every 10 hectares that have been lost. Grasslands are biologically rich and diverse, being dominated by the fourth largest plant family, the Poaceae, with more than 7,500 species. Ecologically, grassland is fascinating and possibly has been the subject of more ecological studies than any other system. Some of the major ecological concepts have arisen from studies in grassland.
Functional Morphology of Animals
Authors: Irschick Duncan J.
Published: March 2013

As a field, functional morphology aims to understand how morphological form is related to function in the broadest sense. The goals of functional morphology are twofold. The first goal is to understand whether different body forms and physical structures (e.g., bone dimensions) match in a logical way with the functions that they appear well suited for (e.g., locomotion, feeding), and whether such matching makes sense in an evolutionary and ecological context. A second goal is mechanistic; namely, to understand how basic functions, such as locomotion, occur by examining lower-level components, such as muscles, bones, and heart tissue. However, the field of functional morphology is heterogeneous and has several subfields, each of which has its own history and traditions, and each of which adds generally to the broad goal of relating form to function. These subfields include functional anatomy, biomechanics, ecomorphology, and evolutionary functional morphology. Functional anatomy predominated for many centuries, and it aimed to infer function from structure. While it remains today as a conceptual tool, it has largely been supplanted by direct measurements of animal function. Biomechanics unites the science of material properties and physics to understand animal movement. Ecomorphology represents an infusion of functional morphological techniques into the field of ecology, and it is useful for understanding specializations to different habitats. Finally, evolutionary functional morphology integrates principles of evolutionary theory with functional morphology. Evolutionary functional morphology has blossomed in particular over the last several decades. The field of functional morphology in its present form came fully into existence in the 1950s and 1960s, but underlying ideas about how form relates to function have been in existence at least since the time of Aristotle. An exact timeline is challenging, but the field was dominated for many years by anatomists, who inferred how form related to function. The advent of technological innovations in the 1950s and 1960s that allowed the visualization of movement and the monitoring of internal structures such as muscles allowed the field to mature such that both form and function could be empirically studied. Whereas research in the 1960s and 1970s was limited to a few model species that could be examined using only a few techniques, the modern field employs a wide array of techniques, both in the field and in the laboratory, and examines many kinds of animal species. The field has evolved from simple descriptions of external form, anatomy, or movement to highly detailed empirical analyses of body movements using high-speed video (kinematics), and force plates (kinetics). Functional morphology is inherently comparative, and it examines many kinds of species (e.g., birds, lizards, mammals) that occur in different environments (e.g., aquatic, terrestrial).
Coevolution
Authors: Brockhurst Michael A. , King Kayla C.
Published: March 2013

Coevolution, the reciprocal evolutionary change of ecologically interacting species, is a central process shaping the structure of biological communities and affects almost all organisms on earth. Its power as an evolutionary force arises from the often intense selection imposed by interactions between species, and from the fact that other species themselves evolve, thereby necessitating continual and sometimes rapid evolutionary change. The pattern and process of coevolution can be observed both at the microevolutionary (e.g., evolution of traits among populations) and macroevolutionary scales (e.g., generation of new species). From a microevolutionary perspective, coevolution can give rise to rapid evolutionary dynamics that may affect ecological processes; moreover, coevolution leads to the evolution of adaptations (and counter-adaptations) in interacting species and thereby may give rise to coadaptation of traits between species. Coevolution can drive divergent microevolutionary trajectories both within and between populations potentially leading to diversification and ultimately speciation. Thus, coevolution is a process linking microevolution and macroevolution. From a macroevolutionary perspective, tightly coevolving species may cospeciate such that the phylogenies of interacting clades appear congruent. This bibliography begins with a historical perspective, before considering conceptual issues surrounding coevolution and the debates that have shaped the field. The key publications exploring the pattern and process of coevolution at both microevolutionary and macroevolutionary scales are outlined.
Polar Regions
Authors: Piepenburg Dieter , Bölter Manfred
Published: March 2013

The polar regions have gained the attention of scientists and the general public alike, especially since explorers first visited these remote and inhospitable places, characterized by the most extreme climatic conditions on Earth, and reported their fascination about them. Scientific research, in the modern sense, however, started little more than one hundred years ago, with Fridtjof Nansen’s seminal Fram expedition to the Arctic Ocean (1893–1896). The early studies that followed the “heroic phase” of the exploration of the polar regions addressed a wide variety of topics, ranging from broad landscape descriptions to very detailed analyses of individual species, adaptations, or metabolic pathways. Much work was done on ecological aspects of the polar environments and their differentiation into geographical and biotic regions. The exploitation of the surprisingly great wealth of natural resources the polar regions house, such as the rich whale populations and, later, the abundant Antarctic krill in the Southern Ocean, were an important driving force behind many ecological investigations. In the recent past, the study of the impacts of climate change, which are particularly severe in both polar regions, came increasingly into focus of researchers. Scientific fieldwork in polar regions is difficult and costly, and since the early days, ecological research has largely been conducted within the framework of multidisciplinary, often international projects. Over the last three decades, international cooperation in polar research has greatly increased, most often under the wings of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC).
Reproductive Allocation in Animals
Authors: Gilbert James
Published: March 2013

Reproductive allocation is a term used in ecology and evolutionary biology that refers to the proportion of an organism’s energy budget allocated to reproduction at any given time. Reproduction must be balanced (or traded off) against opposing expenditures such as growth, survival, maintenance, and future reproduction. The term also covers division of resources among offspring size and number. Studying reproductive allocation trade-offs is fundamental to the fields of behavioral ecology and physiological ecology, which use evolutionary theory to explain and predict animal behavior and physiology, respectively. More specifically, these trade-offs are central to the field of life history, which studies how growth and reproduction is distributed across animals’ lifetimes. Animals show a vast degree of variation in reproductive allocation. Kiwis, for example, famously lay a single egg that is up to 20 percent of body weight. As if this were nothing, caecilians (amphibians) can bear live litters of offspring that are up to 65 percent of the mother’s body weight. Egg numbers vary enormously and can reach spectacular numbers: tsetse flies bear as few as six live offspring in a lifetime, whereas ghost moths can lay more than 50,000 eggs. Social insects have truly mind-boggling fecundity: driver ants can lay several million eggs per month, and can live for decades; ocean sunfish release about 300 million eggs at a time, more than any other vertebrate. At the other extreme, very many organisms have one offspring at a time. Usually this goes hand in hand with repeated breeding, but perhaps the most puzzling of allocation decisions is found in dung beetles, which have only one ovary; some species lay as few as five to ten eggs. Careful parental care ensures that more than 90 percent of offspring survive, explaining why these species have not become extinct. Clearly, variation of this order of magnitude requires evolutionary explanation. Research into reproductive allocation has progressed from a simple household-economics outlook based on the division of a fixed energy budget toward more sophisticated approaches based on quantitative and mechanistic genetics. Of particular use have been model systems such as Drosophila and Daphnia, where traits of reproductive allocation (body size, egg size, egg number, etc.) have become model traits for modern genetic analyses. Modern approaches to reproductive allocation typically involve elucidating genetic bases for trade-offs expressed across a range of environments. Nevertheless, the classical life history approaches remain relevant, especially in systems in which controlled quantitative genetics are not possible.
Trophic Levels
Authors: Dyer Lee A.
Published: March 2013

Trophic levels are determined by feeding relationships, with basal levels consisting of primary producers or detritus and upper levels based on consumption of these basal levels. Organisms on the second trophic level are referred to as primary consumers, which are in turn consumed by secondary consumers, and so on up a theoretical trophic chain. Primary consumers consist of herbivores and detritivores, while the third trophic level and those above include predators and parasites. Energy and matter move up trophic chains, and some compounds, including various toxins, may bioaccumulate at upper trophic levels. The concept of trophic level has generated a sizeable literature yielding useful ecological models, such as trophic cascades, and debates about top-down versus bottom-up regulation of herbivores. This article focuses on the contributions of the trophic-level concept to ecological theory, evolutionary biology, and the applied fields of agricultural and global change biology.