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7 - Scale and an organism-centric focus for studying interspecific interactions in landscapes

from PART II - Theory, experiments, and models in landscape ecology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2009

By
Ralph Mac Nally
Edited by
John A. Wiens  and
Michael R. Moss
Ralph Mac Nally
Affiliation:
Monash University Australia
John A. Wiens
Affiliation:
The Nature Conservancy, Washington DC
Michael R. Moss
Affiliation:
University of Guelph, Ontario
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Summary

Ecologists arguably have been remiss in not developing a formal underpinning for the epistemology of ecology, at least not until the 1980s. At that time, the rather forced imposition of deterministic or heavily constrained stochastic population and community models (see Roughgarden, 1979) drew fire, principally through the emergence of ideas of system “openness” (Wiens, 1984; Gaines and Roughgarden, 1985; Amarasekare, 2000; Hughes et al., 2000; Thrush et al., 2000), non-equilibria (DeAngelis and Waterhouse, 1987; Seastadt and Knapp, 1993) and, especially, “scale” (Wiens et al., 1987; Kotliar and Wiens, 1990; Holling, 1992; Levin, 1992, 2000; Pascual and Levin, 1999). Scales of measurement and observation have tremendous impact on the interpretation of what we think we know about systems and how they operate, which clearly has ramifications for most of the hotly contested areas in community ecology. One such dispute concerns the respective roles of “top-down” (large-scale patterns determine the possibilities for small-scale ones; Whittaker et al., 2001) and “bottom-up” (large-scales are emergent properties of small-scale processes; Wootton, 2001; Ludwig, this volume, Chapter 6) processes in pattern generation in ecological communities (Carpenter et al., 1985).

An increasing number of field studies (e.g., Bowers and Dooley, 1999; Orrock et al., 2000) and simulations (e.g., Bevers and Flather, 1999; Mac Nally, 2000b, 2001) conducted at multiple spatial scales show that outcomes depend upon how the study is constructed and conducted.

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Information
Issues and Perspectives in Landscape Ecology , pp. 52 - 69
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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