ABSTRACT
The spatial and temporal scales of plankton distribution have been evaluated and discussed for many decades (e.g., Bainbridge, 1952; Cassie, 1963; Bjørnsen and Neilsen, 1991; Denman, 1994) due to the importance of patterns of distribution in determining the rates of biological production and transfer of material through the food web. Numerous studies have shown that planktonic organisms have behavioral and physiological responses to small-scale processes (Cullen and Lewis, 1988; Cowles et al., 1988; Butler et al., 1989; Verity, 1991; Tiselius, 1992). The application of new
in situ
instrumentation in optical and acoustical oceanography has revealed vertical pattern over spatial scales of centimeters (Cowles et al., 1990, 1998; Donaghay et al., 1992; Holliday et al., 1998). On larger spatial scales, the advent of satellite remote sensing of ocean color has provided new insights into the horizontal patterns of plankton distribution and their interaction with mesoscale physical processes (Denman and Abbott, 1994; Platt and Sathyendranath, 1994; Letelier et al., 1997; Abbott and Letelier, 1998). These observations of pattern in property distributions (whether those properties are physical or biological) have stimulated the development of new approaches for quantifying and explaining differences in “pattern and process” across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. This work in marine systems has its parallels in terrestrial ecology, where there is increasing theoretical and empirical interest in quantifying pattern (e.g., Caswell and Cohen, 1991; Gardner and O’Neill, 1991; Levin, 1992).
