Recruitment in space and time

摘要

Six years ago, in an address to the Ecological Society of America, Simon Levin wrote that "the problem of pattern and scale is the central problem in ecology, unifying population biology and ecosystem science, and marrying basic and applied ecology". Interest in scale effects has since grown, and patterns or processes have been examined contemporaneously over several scales of space and time. On page 59 of this issue, Terry Hughes and colleagues2 report an important field study on patterns of recruitment and adult abundance of corals on the Great Barrier Reef.