Fundamentals of Ecosystem Science

I teach ecosystem ecology partially from this textbook and one other, and I really like it overall. Some of the detail is a little beyond the upper-division undergraduate level, but it's comprehensive and engaging to read.While I've noticed a few minor errors here and there (even though this is the 2nd edition), my biggest criticism is that many of the figures have color coding indicated by their legends, but the book is printed in black and white! We either need the figures printed in color (which I think is a reasonable request for a $60 book) or have them converted into black-and-white accessible color schemes (like distinctly different shades of gray).My final comment is about Chapter 3 (Secondary Production and Consumer Energetics). I've found this chapter to be very confusing to students, which is odd because the chapter on Primary Production was much easier to understand. It's possible that the material in Chapter 3 wasn't communicated well, but I think the main problem is that this chapter just isn't student-oriented--perhaps there's some other target audience.