School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
J Anim Ecol. 2019 Mar;88(3):439-449. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.12924. Epub 2018 Dec 17.
Understanding how animals interact with their environment is a fundamental ecological question with important implications for conservation and management. The relationships between animals and their habitat, however, can be scale-dependent. If ecologists work at suboptimal spatial scales, they will gain an incomplete picture of how animals respond to the landscape. Identifying the scale at which animal-landscape relationships are strongest (the "scale of effect") will improve our ability to better plan management and conservation activities. Several recent studies have greatly enhanced our knowledge about the scale of effect, and the potential drivers of interspecific variability, in particular life-history traits. However, while many marine systems are inherently multiscalar, research into the scale of effect has been mainly focussed on terrestrial taxa. As the scales of observation in fish-habitat association studies are often selected based on convention rather than biological reasoning, they may provide an incomplete picture of the scales where these associations are strongest. We examined fish-habitat associations across four nested spatial scales in a temperate reef system to ask: (a) at what scale are fish-habitat associations the strongest, (b) are habitat elements consistently important across scales, and (c) do scale-dependent fish-habitat associations vary in relation to either body size, geographic range size or trophic level? We found that: (a) the strongest fish-habitat associations were observed when these relationships were examined at considerably larger spatial scales than usually investigated; (b) the importance of environmental predictors varied across spatial scales, indicating that conclusions about the importance of habitat elements will depend on the scales at which studies are undertaken; and (c) scale-dependent fish-habitat associations were consistent across all life-history traits. Our results highlight the importance of considering how animals relate to their environment and suggest the small scales often chosen to examine fish-habitat associations are likely to be suboptimal. Developing a more mechanistic understanding of animal-habitat associations will greatly aid in predicting and managing responses to future anthropogenic disturbances.
了解动物如何与环境相互作用是一个基本的生态问题，对保护和管理具有重要意义。然而，动物与其栖息地之间的关系可能依赖于尺度。如果生态学家在次优的空间尺度上工作，他们将无法完整地了解动物对景观的反应。确定动物-景观关系最强的尺度（“效应尺度”）将提高我们更好地规划管理和保护活动的能力。最近的几项研究极大地提高了我们对效应尺度的认识，特别是生命史特征的种间变异性的潜在驱动因素。然而，虽然许多海洋系统本质上是多尺度的，但对效应尺度的研究主要集中在陆地分类群上。由于鱼类-栖息地关联研究中的观测尺度通常是基于惯例而不是生物学推理选择的，因此它们可能无法完整地描述这些关联最强的尺度。我们在一个温带珊瑚礁系统中检查了四个嵌套空间尺度的鱼类-栖息地关联，以问：（a）鱼类-栖息地关联在哪个尺度上最强，（b）栖息地要素在所有尺度上是否始终重要，以及（c）与体型、地理范围大小或营养水平相关的尺度依赖性鱼类-栖息地关联是否不同？我们发现：（a）当以比通常研究的大得多的空间尺度来检查这些关系时，观察到最强的鱼类-栖息地关联；（b）环境预测因子的重要性随空间尺度而变化，这表明关于栖息地要素重要性的结论将取决于研究的尺度；（c）与体型、地理范围大小或营养水平相关的尺度依赖性鱼类-栖息地关联在所有生命史特征中都是一致的。我们的结果强调了考虑动物如何与环境相关的重要性，并表明通常选择研究鱼类-栖息地关联的小尺度可能是次优的。对动物-栖息地关联的更机械的理解将极大地有助于预测和管理对未来人为干扰的反应。
