Ecologists are increasingly tackling difficult issues like global change, loss of biodiversity, and sustainability of ecosystem services. These and related questions are enormously challenging, requiring unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration and rapid synthesis of massive amounts of diverse data into information and, ultimately, our knowledge base. This book addresses these issues, providing a much needed resource for those involved in designing and implementing ecological research, as well as students who are entering the environmental sciences.
Chapters focus on the design of ecological studies, data management principles, scientific databases, data quality assurance, data documentation, archiving ecological data and information, and processing data into information and knowledge.