Seascape patch dynamics

Our world is heterogeneous, patchy, at a range of scales in time and space (Wiens 1976), yet the majority of scientific models examining ecological relationships oversimplify complexity by averaging out values at a single focal scale (Grünbaum 2012). In contrast, landscape and seascape ecology embrace spatial heterogeneity and place temporal variability into a spatial context. The importance of placing greater focus on ‘patchiness’ was emphasized by Simon Levin during his Robert H. MacArthur Award Lecture in 1989, where he proposed that the key to understanding and predicting ecological pattern and the consequences of disturbance was to understand the mechanisms driving patch structure (Levin 1992).