ABSTRACT
The Brazilian Pantanal is a most amazing place, presenting us with a spatial panorama of swamp, savannah, and forest (e.g., Figure 6.1). Organisms are constrained in this space. So, for example, if you wished to encounter a capybara (Figure 6.1(c)) in the Pantanal, a large marshland area in western Brazil, you would not go to any of the “islands” of terrestrial vegetation that dot the marshland (Figure 6.1(a)), but Images from the Pantanal of Brazil. (a) An area of the Pantanal, near Campo Grande in southern Brazil. (b) The giant anteater, common in the upland areas of the Pantanal. (c) The capybara, the world's largest rodent, common in the marshy areas of the Pantanal https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203526712/613a6702-7e62-46fe-a1ce-2d11d2c79891/content/fig6_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Finer scales of the Pantanal. (a) Vista showing patches of open water and various kinds of marsh grasses forming non-random and non-uniform patchwork. (b) Close-up of the vegetation in one of the open water areas with various vegetation textures also forming a non-random pattern https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203526712/613a6702-7e62-46fe-a1ce-2d11d2c79891/content/fig6_2_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> rather you would search the marshland itself. If you were interested instead in seeing a giant anteater (Figure 6.1(b)), you would concentrate your search in the upland patches. And then, at closer range, we see a similar patchy pattern in the vegetation (Figure 6.2), qualitatively repeated at even closer magnification. The more we study spatial patterns in nature, the more it looks like all ecosystems exhibit similar patterns at a variety of scales, or what is called fractal character.
