Abstract
Ecological transition zones are believed to be unique in their ability to shed light on the organization of populations and communities. In this paper, we study vegetation dynamics in the Great Plains short-grass steppe and Chihuahuan desert grassland ecotone in New Mexico, USA, using long-term, high resolution transect studies of the Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research Program. We focus on spatial pattern and examine this in several ways: patch size distribution, spatial autocorrelation analysis, and fractal scaling. These methods are used to examine patch size distributions in two sites representing distributional limits of the dominant species and for detection of an emergent scaling property. We found no characteristic spatial resolution (quadrat size), but rather a fractal structure of spatial variation in abundance and a trend towards consistency of the pattern in time when species were closer to their distributional limit. In this, we were able to detect a robust power law behaviour (the emergent property), indicating strong spatial organization via anti-persistence. Our investigation was exploratory in nature; we feel the results are highly suggestive of intrinsic organization in ecological dynamics and may also be useful in generating testable hypotheses regarding the behaviour of species along ecotones.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Aguilera, M.O. and W.K. Lauenroth. 1993. Neighborhood interactions in a natural population of the perennial bunchgrass Bouteloua gracilis. Oecologia 94:595–602.
Berry, M. V. and Z.V. Lewis. 1980. On the Weirstrass-Mandelbrot fractal function. Proc. Royal Soc. London Series A 370:459–484.
Burrough, P.A. 1981. The fractal dimension of landscape and other data. Nature 294:240–242.
Castri di F., A.J. Hansen and M.M. Holland. 1988. A new look at ecotones: emerging international projects on landscape boundaries. Biology International 17: 47–106.
De Patta Pillar, V. 2001. MULTIV. Multivariate Exploratory Analysis, Randomization Testing and Bootstrap Resampling. Universidade Federal Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Delcourt, H.R. and P.A. Delcourt and W. Thompson. 1983. Dynamic plant ecology: the spectrum of vegetational change in space and time. Quaternary Science Reviews 1:153–175.
Fortin, M.J. 1994. Edge detection algorithms for 2-dimensional ecological data. Ecology 75:956–965.
Fortin, M.J. 2000. Effects of sampling unit resolution on the estimation of spatial autocorrelation. Ecoscience 6:636–641.
Gosz, J.R. 1991. Sevilleta. In: K. Van Cleve and S. Martin (eds.), Long-Term Ecological Research in the United States. Long-Term Ecological Research Network Office, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. pp. 148–157.
Gosz, J. R. 1993. Ecotone hierarchies. Ecological Applications 3:369–376.
Gosz, J.R. and P.J.H. Sharpe. 1989. Broad-scale concepts for interactions of climate, topography, and biota at biome transitions. Landscape Ecology 3:229–243.
Greig-Smith, P. 1979. Pattern in vegetation. J. Ecol. 67:755–779.
Greig-Smith, P. 1983. Quantitative Plant Ecology. 3rd ed. Blackwell Scientific, Oxford.
Hurst, H.E. 1951. Long term storage capacity of resevoirs. Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 116:770–799.
Ives, A.R. 1991. Aggregation and coexistence in a carrion fly community. Ecol. Monogr. 61: 75–94.
Li, B.L. 2000. Fractal geometry applications in description and analysis of patch patterns and patch dynamics. Ecol. Model. 132: 33–50.
Li, B.L. 2001a. Applications of fractal geometry and percolation theory to landscape analysis and assessments. In: M.E. Jensen and P.E. Bourgeron (eds.), A Guidebook for Integrated Ecological Assessments. Springer, New York. pp. 200–210.
Li, B.L. 2001b. A theoretical framework of ecological phase transitions for characterizing tree-grass dynamics. Acta Biotheoretica, in press.
Loehle, C., B.L. Li and R.C. Sundell. 1996. Forest spread and phase transitions at forest-prairie ecotones in Kansas, USA. Landscape Ecology 11: 225–235.
Mandelbrot, B.B. 1983. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. W.H. Freeman, San Francisco.
Peitgen, H.O., H. Jürgens and D. Saupe. 1992. Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science. Springer, New York.
Qi, Y. and J. Wu 1996. Effects of changing spatial resolution on the results of landscape pattern analysis using spatial autocorrelation indices. Landscape Ecol. 11:39–49.
Upton, G.J.G. and B.Fingleton. 1985. Spatial Data Analysis by Example. Volume I. Point Pattern and Quantitative Data. Wiley and Sons, Chichester.
Wang, X.F. 2001. Temporal and spatial structures of black and blue gramas: statistical analysis of biotic and abiotic interactions from Sevilleta vegetation transect data. M.Sc. Thesis. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.
Acknowledgments
X.F. Wang provided computational support. Funding support was from an NSERC of Canada grant to M.A. and U.S. National Science Foundation (DEB-00-80529, DEB-00-83422 and DEI-98-20318) and DOE/Sandia National Laboratories (BG-7557) grants to B.L. We gratefully acknowledge critical comments from S. Bartha and J.B. Wilson. This is Sevilleta publication no. 220.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
About this article
Cite this article
Anand, M., Li, B.L. Spatiotemporal dynamics in a transition zone: patchiness, scale, and an emergent property. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 2, 161–169 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.2.2001.2.3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.2.2001.2.3