What is the right scale? Encouraging fruitful engagement for ecology with ecohydraulics

Abstract

In ecohydraulics research, both physical and biological variables must be sampled at scales that are appropriate to the questions being addressed. This essay focuses on ecological topics that may be addressed in the context of ecohydraulics and the scales appropriate for their investigation. The first sections discuss definitions of scale, how environmental heterogeneity influences experimental and sampling designs, and the importance of recognizing that physical and ecological heterogeneity are not necessarily related. Thus, the scales appropriate for a particular research problem should be determined primarily by the ecological phenomenon of interest, plus the generation time and life-spac..