THE EFFECT OF CHANGING SAMPLING SCALES ON OUR ABILITY TO DETECT EFFECTS OF LARGE-SCALE PROCESSES ON COMMUNITIES

This study investigates the effect of increasing sampling resolution o n our ability to detect the effects of large-scale processes on marine benthic communities. The sampling resolutions used are common to many marine benthic studies (i.e., in order of increasing resolution: vide o transects; grab sampling; small-core sampling). We investigate wheth er: (1) loss of information about the finer scale inhibits our ability to detect relationships between large-scale (e.g., environmental) pro cesses and communities at coarser resolutions; or (2) information coll ected at the finer scale is noisy and obscures detection of large-scal e relationships; or (3) the same information is available from ail 3 r esolutions. We detected fewest relationships between environmental var iables and communities at our coarsest resolution; this has important implications to study designs utilising video methods. The results of this study suggest that finding an 'appropriate' scale of sampling for impact assessment may not be a question that should be concerning us. Rather, multiscale modelling and sampling may provide us with an incr eased ability to detect and interpret large-scale relationships. (C) 1 998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.