Modeling the Primary Productivity of the World

The many problems of energy and nutrient flow and their relationship to the structure of communities and potential for harvest make primary productivity interesting. The correlation between the productivity and character of vegetation cover, and the potential for agriculture and the environmental aspects of cultural development, have created additional interest. This volume emphasizes the fact that assessment of primary productivity is a time-consuming and expensive procedure. In some cases, it is even logistically impossible to measure the current productivity rate directly. Under such circumstances, one is inclined to look for indirect ways to estimate the productive capacity of any given region. The most feasible approach to the task is the elaboration of models that predict productivity from environmental parameters that have been measured in a reasonably dense network over the world.