PARENT SESSION
Poster Session #25: Marine Ecology.
Wednesday, August 8, 2001. Presentation from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM. Exhibition Hall
122
Spatial heterogeneity of seagrass beds in the Indian River Lagoon, Florida.
Love, Matthew1, Weishampel, John2, 1 2
ABSTRACT- Ecological systems are spatially heterogeneous, exhibiting considerable complexity and variability in time and space (Gustafson, 1998). Understanding patterns in terms of the processes that produce them is the essence of science, and is the key to the development of principles for management (Levin, 1992). Quantitative methods that link spatial patterns and ecological processes at broad spatial scales are needed both in basic ecological research and in applied environmental problems (Turner and Gardner, 1990). Most measures of diversity, such as species diversity indices or maps of distributional patterns are thought to be insufficient for describing the geometry of seagrass species distributions and spatial habitat diversity (Virnstein, 1995). Recognizing the limitations of Euclidean geometry in defining natural structures, ecologists have embraced fractal geometry to address problems involving scale and hierarchy (Sugihara and May, 1990). In this study we sampled seagrass beds in an array of transects every 2 meters at three different sites to obtain a solid representation of the species spatial heterogeneity of each seagrass bed. Through semi-variance analysis of the spatial data, a two dimensional coverage map will be developed with krigging techniques in order to analyze the spatial patterns in all directions of the coverage. This will be completed for three different areas of the extremely diverse Indian River Lagoon System. Fractal analysis will then be used to quantify the heterogeneity of spatial patterns in each of these beds.
KEY WORDS: seagrass, semivariance, fractals, krigging