Spatial Variation as a Tool for Inferring Temporal Variation and Diagnosing Types of Mechanisms in Ecosystems

Ecological processes, like the rise and fall of populations, leave an imprint of their dynamics as a pattern in space. Mining this spatial record for insight into temporal change underlies many applications, including using spatial snapshots to infer trends in communities, rates of species spread across boundaries, likelihood of chaotic dynamics, and proximity to regime shifts. However, these approaches rely on an inherent but undefined link …