Brian Wilsey is a professor at Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA. He has studied grassland ecology for the past 25 years, on topics ranging from global change effects on plant-grazer interactions, relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, species diversity maintenance, carbon and nutrient cycling, and community assembly. He has visited and worked in grassland systems around the world, including the tall and midgrass prairies of the central U.S., savannah grasslands in Tanzania, steppe in China, and flooding Pampa of Argentina. He has published more than 80 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals on these and other topics.
Scientists and other professionals working in grasslands will find The Biology of Grasslands a superb quick reference for everything grassland related. Those readers will especially like the tables listing species that negatively affect grasslands and experiments exploring grassland restoration. Students or anyone seeking an introduction to ecology or grassland ecology should also read this book. Wilsey effectively covers many central concepts to ecology, making this book, in a sense, an introduction to ecology through the lens of the grassland biome. Achieving these 2 disparate goals of reference and introduction is no easy task, but Wilsey accomplished it with aplomb. * David S. Mason, Journal of Wildlife Management *