ABSTRACT

Levin (1992) argues that ‘the problem of pattern and

scale is the central problem in ecology’. Aquatic ecolo-

gists manifest Levin’s argument by their three decadal

searches for spatial and temporal patterns in rivers.

This search has generated a series of increasingly

complex conceptual models spanning the Nutrient

Spiraling Concept (Webster & Patten 1979), River

Continuum Concept (Vannote et al., 1980), Serial

Discontinuity Concept (Ward & Stanford 1983), the

Flood Pulse Concept (Junk et al., 1989), the Patch

Dynamics Concept (Pringle et al., 1988, Townsend

1989), the Natural Disturbance concept (Resh et al.,

1988), Habitat Templet concept (Poff & Ward 1990,

Townsend & Hildrew 1994), the Riverscape Concept

(Fausch et al., 2002), the Natural Flow Paradigm (Poff

et al., 1997; Richter et al., 1996), and its corollary,

the Normative River Concept (Stanford et al., 1996),