Author
Listed:
- Warmuth, Laura M.
- Cai, Xiatong
- Martinho, Filipe
- Darnaude, Audrey M.
- Smoliński, Szymon
- Hidalgo, Manuel
- López-López, Lucía
Abstract
Anticipating the future of the oceans is an emerging challenge in the Anthropocene. The complexity, dynamic nature, and limited accessibility of the marine environment make many ecological processes harder to understand and quantify than in terrestrial ecosystems. Many of these processes depend on marine functional connectivity (MFC) across different spatial and temporal scales. MFC is defined as the movement of marine organisms transferring genes, matter or energy between habitat patches or ecosystems, thereby impacting their biodiversity, functioning, and resilience. Advances in MFC understanding and quantification are essential for the effective management and protection of marine ecosystems and their services. This Viewpoint article aims to help bridge the gap between empiricists in this field and theoretical ecology modellers. We discuss conceptual and mathematical limitations as well as data shortages for the development of meta-population, meta-community, and meta-ecosystem models. The primary challenges in applying meta-ecology theory to MFC data include accurately identifying the respective value of environmental patches for connectivity and predicting environmental variability across those patches. Limitations in empirical data mainly encompass (a) environmental variation and seascape patchiness; (b) diversity in organism life cycle and behaviour; (c) distribution and ecology of non-commercial species; and (d) fluxes of genes and matter at different spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales. We advocate that enhancing the interaction between MFC modellers and empiricists will play a major role in overcoming these limitations and promoting the application of meta-ecology theory and models in ecological connectivity research. This will boost our capacity in providing operational solutions forcurrent threats to marine ecosystems.
Suggested Citation
Warmuth, Laura M. & Cai, Xiatong & Martinho, Filipe & Darnaude, Audrey M. & Smoliński, Szymon & Hidalgo, Manuel & López-López, Lucía, 2025.
"Crossing paths between empirical ecologists and meta-ecology modellers to advance marine functional connectivity estimation and prediction,"
Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 509(C).
Handle:
RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:509:y:2025:i:c:s030438002500225x
DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2025.111239
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to
for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:509:y:2025:i:c:s030438002500225x. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/ecological-modelling .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.