David Ward, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016. xv + 370 pp.

First published in Austral Ecology.

Contrary to the popular perception that deserts are wastelands, they house some of the most diverse communities of flora and fauna of any environment on the planet. Thus, deserts provide biologists and ecologists an ideal setting to explore and test many ecological, behavioural, ecophysiological and evolutionary theories. Or as Professor
David Ward writes, we can view ‘deserts as laboratories of nature, where natural selection is exposed at its most extreme’. The Biology of Deserts provides a significant summary of the abiotic and biotic processes, which operate in arid environments, and represents one of the few general texts on desert biology (also see Whitford 2002).

Read the full review here.

References:

Whitford W. (2002). Ecology of Desert Systems. Academic Press, San Diego.

Greenville A.C. (2017). The Biology of Deserts – David Ward , 2nd edition. Austral Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/aec.12523