On the Wings of Checkerspots

This book is a collaboration of two leading workers laying out the insights into population biology, ecology and conservation biology that can be gained through intensive and long-term investigation of a judiciously chosen model system, the populations of checkerspot butterflies that Ehrlich and colleagues have worked on in California, and the Finnish populations that Hanski has investigated. Hanski is the leading thinker and worker on metapopulation ecology, one of the hotter areas in ecology currently, and Ehrlich is one of the leading ecologists/conservation biologists. This book will report on and synthesize the major long-term research of both workers' careers on the population biology of checkerspot butterflies. It is very likely to be received as a classic work of population biology, studied by all or most graduate students in ecology, conservation biology, and population biology, and read and referred to by a very broad range of theoretical organismic biologists.