Defeo O, McLachlan A
Patterns, processes and regulatory mechanisms in sandy beach macrofauna: a multi-scale analysis
Beaches dominate the world's coasts and are focal points in tourism and coastal zone management.
Sandy beaches have traditionally received less attention from ecologists than other coastal and marine environments. To some extent this has improved over the last few decades and we now have a much better understanding of beach environments and ecology.
Large scale patterns in communities are clear and are well explained by the response to the fauna to the physical environment, especially sand, swash, tide range and latitude. Moving to finer scales the picture becomes more complex and biological interactions become more important.
This paper delves into such processes at various scales in order to explain the clear macroscale patterns and more complex patterns at finer spatial scales. It brings all the current ideas on beach ecology at community and population level into a synthesis of the state of the art. This will not only guide future work on sandy beach systems but will also provide a useful overview for coastal zone authorities and resource managers dealing with sandy coastal systems.
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