Population biology 20 years later

When Jonathan Silvertown’s Introduction to Plant Population Ecology was first published in 1982 (Silvertown, 1982) it was a very good little book that covered an important niche. John Harper’s magnum opus, Population Biology of Plants (Harper, 1977), had come out five years previously and become an instant classic reference, serving as a manifesto for the new field of plant population ecology. While not covering much new ground conceptually, the Silvertown volume was, well, short. And engaging! It started off with a story about two female plant ecologists on a field trip to a forest, one of whom merely made lists of species, while the good one (the population ecologist) was armed with a tree borer, tape measure, and a quadrat. The first one found out what the forest was like, but the second found out why and how it seemed to be changing. As a nerdy young professor, I didn’t understand why my undergraduate plant ecology students preferred reading this to reading the chapters I assigned from Harper’s book. Yet here was the cream of the story in a quick and interesting 200-page read. And, just as it was becoming a bit dated, Silvertown came out with a new edition in 1987, which covered many of the new developments of the preceding five years. While these volumes provided nice short introductions to the ecological side of the plant population biology revolution, it was much harder to find good textbook readings for the burgeoning evolutionary and genetic side of the field. To teach plant life history evolution and the evolutionary ecology of plant reproduction and breeding systems in undergraduate plant ecology or plant population biology courses we all made many detailed handouts and assigned research papers and reviews from the original literature. This was addressed with the third edition, now titled Introduction to Plant Population Biology and coauthored with Jonathan Lovett Doust (Silvertown and Lovett Doust, 1993). The new volume contained totally new chapters on variation and its inheritance, ecological genetics, and the evolutionary ecology of plant sexuality and mating systems. Now eight years later, minus Lovett Doust, plus Deborah Charlesworth, we have the fourth edition. And it still is doing a good job of filling its expanded niche as a concise and engaging up-to-date introduction to plant population ecology and evolution written by two knowledgeable leaders in these fields. What makes a book like this appealing is that it takes general concepts of ecological and evolutionary population biology and explores them in relationship to a specific group of organisms, one that the readers of the American Journal of Botany are particularly fond of. Is it a book about general