Much progress has been made in recent years in the development of models of communities subject to spatial and temporal variability. So active is the work on the spatial front that it is regarded as a new field, spatial ecology. But a daunting challenge is how you test spatial ecology in the field. An equally daunting challenge is how you achieve general understanding of spatial and temporal mechanisms. Developments in this lab over many years have led to a body of work called scale transition theory, which explains spatial and temporal ecology in terms of interactions between nonlinear population processes and variation in space and time. Of most importance, this work leads to ways of testing spatial and temporal ecology, which are general, powerful and practical.
