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Recent work in ecology suggests that the diversity of responses to environmental change among species contributing to the same ecosystem function can strongly influence ecosystem resilience. To render this important realization more useful for understanding coupled human-natural systems, we broaden the concept of response diversity to include heterogeneity in human decisions and action. Simply put, not all actors respond the same way to challenges, opportunities, and risks. The range, prevalence, and spatial and temporal distributions of different responses may be crucial to the resilience or the transformation of a social-ecological system, and thus have a bearing on human vulnerability and well-being in the face of environmental, socioeconomic, and political change. Response diversity can be seen at multiple scales (e.g., household, village, region) and response diversity at one scale may act synergistically with or contrary to the effects of diversity at another scale.

Current ecological thinking emphasizes that systems are complex, dynamic, and unpredictable across space and time. What is the diversity in interpretation of these ideas among today's ecologists, and what does this mean for environmental management? This

With the publication of this special issue of Circumpolar Journal, the Arctic Centre of the University of Groningen would like to honour Piet Oosterveld as the driving force behind biological research on Edgeøya, Spitsbergen. He invested large amounts of time and energy in this research and he was an inspiration for many students. The book starts with an article about Piet Oosterveld's Arctic activities written by Louwrens Hacquebord. After some fieldwork in Iceland Piet Oosterveld's Arctic career really started with a wintering spent on Edgeøya in 1968-1969. In this book Piet Oosterveld's comp

The diversification of the global workforce brings both challenges and opportunities. We focus on diversity defined by membership in traditionally underrepresented groups. To harness the power of diversity, organizations must: increase representation of diverse individuals throughout the organizational hierarchy, attend to the social processes that emerge once diversity is present, and foster an organizational climate that supports the full inclusion of diverse individuals. We review dynamics at multiple levels of analysis that affect organizations in these three realms. Policy recommendations are grounded in the following ecological principles: (1) organizational issues are nested within multiple levels of context, (2) any organizational event can have reverberating effects throughout the system, (3) people's experiences of events shape their reactions and the impact of practices on varied groups shapes organizational consequences, and (4) people are continually adapting to one another and to organizational resources and requirements.

Genetic diversity in crop plants is crucial for long-term world food security. This diversity is sustained in the field primarily by poor farmers in developing countries, who receive no compensation for providing this external benefit to humankind. When agricultural imports displace local production in centers of genetic diversity, this threatens both rural livelihoods and the continued provision of this external benefit. The North American Free Trade Agreement's impact on Mexican maize farming illustrates the problem. The prospects for remedial policies are shaped by the distribution of the costs and benefits of action of inaction.

A better understanding of the dynamic roles of soils in ecosystems has followed advances in techniques for identifying and characterising the organisms and the community, at the same time as measuring major ecosystem processes. This book brings together and synthesises this material and puts soils in their wider ecological context

Understanding and predicting species diversity in ecological communities is one of the great challenges in community ecology. Popular recent theory contends that the traits of species are "neutral" or unimportant to coexistence, yet abundant experimental evidence suggests that multiple species are able to coexist on the same limiting resource precisely because they differ in key traits, such as body size, diet, and resource demand. This book presents a new theory of coexistence that incorporates two important aspects of biodiversity in nature--scale and spatial variation in the supply of limit