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),