Discontinuities, cross‐scale patterns, and the organization of ecosystems

Nash, Kirsty L.; Allen, Craig R.; Angeler, David G.; Barichievy, Chris; Eason, Tarsha; Garmestani, Ahjond S.; Graham, Nicholas A. J.; Granholm, Dean; Knutson, Melinda G.; Nelson, R. John; Nyström, Magnus; Stow, Craig A.; Sundstrom, Shana M.

doi:10.1890/13-1315.1

Cited by 113 publications

(133 citation statements)

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“…species abundance, occurrence) are commonly used to identify intrinsic-scales associated with pattern-process relationships. The relationship of scale with ecological processes is described by related theories such as scale discontinuities [55,56], domains of scale [3,57] and hierarchy theory [20] (see Nash et al [56] for a summary).…”

Section: Effects On Ecological Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Progress on Spatial and Thematic Resolution in Landscape Ecology

Lechner

Rhodes

2016

Curr Landscape Ecol Rep

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In this review we examine the past 5 years of landscape ecology research examining the effects of both spatial and thematic resolution on ecological analysis. While spatial resolution has been a topic of research for many decades, scale effects from thematic resolution have only recently been studied. Recent multi-scale analyses have demonstrated that the effects of thematic resolution on ecological analysis are comparable to spatial resolution and both spatial and thematic resolution interact. Additionally, spatial and thematic resolution can impact on multi-scale methods that are commonly used to identify the intrinsic scale-the scale at which ecological phenomena interact with the environment. A key aim of multi-scale analysis in landscape ecology is to characterise the scale-dependency of ecological processes, however, the interdisciplinary nature of landscape ecology means that research on scale has incorporated methods from a range of disciplines. These methods and concepts include: 1) multi-scale methods which characterise the sensitivity of an analysis to the modifiable areal unit problem, 2) spatial statistics for characterising the scale dependency of landscape patterns and identifying the optimal scale and 3) ecological theory describing intrinsic scales/domains of scales. We conclude by drawing on the existing literature to describe potential future areas of research to address the impacts of spatial and thematic resolution. We suggest further research on the effects of thematic resolution and conceptualising the scale continuum as multi-dimensional. We also identify mechanistic models and spatial statistics as a promising direction for future research.

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Section: Effects On Ecological Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Progress on Spatial and Thematic Resolution in Landscape Ecology

Lechner

Rhodes

2016

Curr Landscape Ecol Rep

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“…However, the importance of functional redundancy within a community for ecosystem resilience cannot be understood without considering the hierarchical organization of ecosystems . That is, ecological patterns manifest, and processes unfold, at independent scales of space and time (Holling 1992, Nash et al 2014. For example, because organisms of different sizes differ in their resource use as a function of the spatial and temporal distribution of these resources, distinct scales at which different organisms operate can be distinguished.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying spatial scaling patterns and their local and regional correlates in headwater streams: implications for resilience

Göthe¹,

Sandin²,

Allen³

et al. 2014

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ABSTRACT. The distribution of functional traits within and across spatiotemporal scales has been used to quantify and infer the relative resilience across ecosystems. We use explicit spatial modeling to evaluate within-and cross-scale redundancy in headwater streams, an ecosystem type with a hierarchical and dendritic network structure. We assessed the cross-scale distribution of functional feeding groups of benthic invertebrates in Swedish headwater streams during two seasons. We evaluated functional metrics, i.e., Shannon diversity, richness, and evenness, and the degree of redundancy within and across modeled spatial scales for individual feeding groups. We also estimated the correlates of environmental versus spatial factors of both functional composition and the taxonomic composition of functional groups for each spatial scale identified. Measures of functional diversity and within-scale redundancy of functions were similar during both seasons, but both within-and cross-scale redundancy were low. This apparent low redundancy was partly attributable to a few dominant taxa explaining the spatial models. However, rare taxa with stochastic spatial distributions might provide additional information and should therefore be considered explicitly for complementing future resilience assessments. Otherwise, resilience may be underestimated. Finally, both environmental and spatial factors correlated with the scale-specific functional and taxonomic composition. This finding suggests that resilience in stream networks emerges as a function of not only local conditions but also regional factors such as habitat connectivity and invertebrate dispersal.

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“…The impacts of environmental change are scale-specific (Nash et al 2014). We found variables 448 related to environmental change (acidity, water color) correlating only with specific species groups 449 revealed by the time series modeling.…”

Section: Discussion 389mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2014; Nash et al 2014). To account for scale, the cross-scale resilience model was developed to 95 empirically quantify ecological resilience (Peterson et al 1998).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%