The book provides a way forward to advance our numerical models to include the details of modular plant growth that are key to understanding clonal plant dynamics and colonization. Readers are introduced to an individual based approach combined with a specific growth rate model to simulate aquatic clonal plants that can be applied to other species and ecosystems. These lessons are of interest to the natural resource manager practicing conservation and restoration, as well as ecologists working to develop models that include realism while also allowing for emergent behaviour.
Chapter 1: Seagrass Ecology And The Clonal Plant Perspective.
Chapter
2: The Specific Growth Rate Submodel.
Chapter 3: The Ramet.
Chapter 4 The
Virtual Meadow.
Chapter 5: The Restored Meadow.
Lora Harris is an estuarine ecologist who applies field and modeling approaches to address questions regarding nutrient dynamics and climate change in a range of coastal ecosystems. She is especially interested in understanding restoration trajectories, and how climate and management actions interact to affect ecosystem structure and function in estuaries and lagoons.
Jessica Cohn is an ecological restoration specialist with the state of Massachusetts. She brings ecological and nature-based solutions to help solve pressing environmental and social challenges while conserving and restoring native ecosystems.
Scott W. Nixon (d. 2012) was the first ecosystem ecologist to define coastal eutrophication and co-designed the first ecosystem model to describe an estuarine system. He was known for his efforts to synthesize and leverage comparative datasets to better understand coastal ecosystems, especially in ways that could be translated to management.
