The relationship between topography, land use, and topsoil moisture storage is investigated for a small catchment with undulating deep loess hilslopes in the south of the Netherlands. For a period of 10 months, soil moisture profiles have been measured weekly at 15 locations throughout the catchment. A Generalized Additive Model was employed to find relationships between the various factors inf...

Spatial variation in diversity results from the interplay of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms acting over contemporary and historical time frames (MacArthur 1972, Graham et al. 2006, Ricklefs 2006, Jetz et al. 2012). Numerous attempts have been made to evaluate the relative roles of ecological and evolutionary factors that operate at diverse spatial and temporal scales in shaping patterns...

The spatial scale of animal space use, e.g. measured as individual home range size, is a key trait with important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes as well as management and conservation of populations and ecosystems. Explaining variation in home range size has therefore received great attention in ecological research. However, few studies have examined multiple hypotheses ...

Complexity theory proposes that spatial self-organization, the process whereby small-scale, localized interactions among the components of a system generate complex spatial structures at large spatial scales, explains the formation of autogenic spatial patterns in ecosystems. We question this premise by reviewing three estuarine ecosystems - mussel beds, mudflats and salt marshes - where self-o...

1. The functional characteristics of forests are related to the organization of their canopies. However, understanding the relationship between canopy structure and function has been limited by a paucity of methods for determining structure at scales consistent with those of function measurements. 2. We describe here a portable system, assembled from commercially available components, for acqui...

Ecological processes play a critical role in shaping the world in which we live and guiding our interactions with it. As humans we are consistently attempting to predict, understand and sometimes control the behaviour of the natural world. Whether we are trying to forecast the upcoming seasonal rains, recreating a forest fire to understand why it burned in a particular manner, or making land ma...

A challenge in ecological studies is defining scales of observation that correspond to relevant ecological scales for organisms or processes. Image segmentation has been proposed as an alternative to pixel-based methods for scaling remotely-sensed data into ecologically-meaningful units. However, to date, selection of image object sets has been largely subjective. Changing scale of image segmen...

Host species richness and parasite species richness are often positively correlated, but the strength of this relationship varies from study to study. What accounts for this variability? Here, we explore the role of spatial scale in mediating the commonly reported positive relationship between host and parasite diversity. Building from ecological theory, we lay out a series of hypotheses for ho...