The first edition of Crop Ecology (by Loomis and Connor) appeared in 1992. This revision is long overdue but worth the wait. In addition to feeding the projected 9 billion people inhabiting the planet by 2050, food security and environmental conservation are also current agricultural priorities.

Part I of the book deals with farming systems and their biological components. The first chapter introduces ideas about the nature and objectives of farming together with strategic and tactical decisions made by farmers, in order to provide the context for the detailed studies of crops and cropping systems. This includes ways to measure performance in terms of efficiency and yield. The following chapters in this section deal with trophic chains, community concepts, genetic resources and plant development.

Part II deals with the physical and chemical environment in two chapters: on the aerial environment and on soil resources. Here, the impacts of crop management decisions on the extent to which crop communities modify their local microenvironment are the focus, emphasizing the role of solar energy in driving crop biomass production.

Part III covers production processes with chapters on nitrogen processes, water relations, photosynthesis and respiration and partitioning.

Part IV deals with resource management, with chapters on soil management, strategies and tactics for rainfed agriculture, water management in irrigated agriculture and energy and labour. In this section, the focus is the application of ecological principles in choosing technological options to design or modify crop production systems. The end result is an agronomic system.

The final section, V, is about farming past, present and future. Two chapters document the development of wheat production systems in Australia since 1850 and the more recent developments of currently important systems in USA, Asia and Brazil. The chapter on the future of agriculture is clearly of importance to us all. The chapter aims to integrate the information on human population changes, and changes in food demand and preferences, with the technological advances and possibilities, as constrained by a desire to conserve natural resources and by climate change.

A useful feature is a summary of the key concepts at the end of each chapter.

The second edition provides a worthy successor to the first. It updates the information, the presentation and the synthesis. It is easy to read despite containing a wealth of detail. It is definitely a book to recommend to serious students of crop science and of managed ecosystems.