The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology

Movements of Marine Fish and Decapod Crustaceans: Process, Theory and Application

“…We now know that animals are influenced by patterns and processes occurring at a range of scales of space, time and organisational complexity (Haury et al, 1978;Hatcher et al, 1987;Steele, 1988Steele, , 1989Barry and Dayton, 1991;Holling, 1992;Levin, 1992;Marquet et al, 1993). Furthermore, marine animals are likely to respond to and be constrained by the composition and spatial arrangement of resources in a hierarchical way, as has been suggested for many terrestrial animals (Senft et al, 1987;Schaefer and Messier, 1995;McAlpine et al, 1999;Rolstad et al, 2000).…”

“…Response is a broad term that can mean physiological, behavioural or morphological reaction of an individual to the environment. It may be species or life-stage specific (Levin, 1992) and will emerge in patterns of populations and metapopulations (Hanski, 1998). Within a multi-species assemblage the animal response to multi-scale spatial pattern will be diverse owing to the range of behaviours, morphology and physiology.…”

“…These patterns cover temporal scales ranging from a few minutes to many years and spatial scales from several centimetres to trans-oceanic movements spanning hundreds of kilometres (Quinn and Brodeur, 1991). The complex nature of movements, however, presents both a conceptual and operational problem in selecting appropriate scales in ecological studies (Wiens, 1976;Addicott et al, 1987;Wiens and Milne, 1989;Kotliar and Wiens, 1990;Levin, 1992).…”

“…Despite the growing realisation that inferences about ecological phenomena are scale-dependent, ecological scale has rarely been incorporated explicitly into conceptual models or experimental design (Meentemeyer, 1989;Milne, 1991;Levin, 1992;Gardner, 1998). Instead, scales of observation are often selected for their methodological convenience, rather than for their ecological suitability (Meentemeyer, 1989;Haslett, 1990;Petersen and Hastings, 2001).…”

Evaluating community–environment relationships along fine to broad taxonomic resolutions reveals evolutionary forces underlying community assembly

“…In addition, we calculated the phylogeny-based UniFrac metric (Lozupone and Knight, 2005) as a standard to contrast our multi-level taxonomy-based composition analyses, as this metric has recently gained popularity in microbial community analyses and believed to be more informative than taxonomy-based estimates (Lozupone and Knight, 2005;Swenson, 2014). Moreover, given the potential scale dependency (Levin, 1992;Cavender-Bares et al, 2006Swenson et al, 2006Swenson et al, , 2007 in community-environment relationships, we considered case studies covering sampling sites from either global or local scales (Table 1) and which may provide insight into the scale dependency of microbial community assembly. Previous studies on plant communities (focused on within-community phylogenetic structure) have identified concerns about spatiotemporal and taxonomic scales on the detected pattern.…”