Abstract
Mesocosms, also known as “container experiments”, are appealing because they offer precise manipulative control over the factors of interest, but still capture aspects of the natural world. They have been in use in aquatic ecology for many decades and are particularly well suited to address questions in community and population ecology. In this chapter, I illustrate how to apply them to landscape ecology research. All mesocosms represent in situ distributed experiments, which a researcher can place within a landscape to facilitate addressing a spatially explicit question. In this chapter, I also show how, with some creativity, researchers can harness mesocosms to conduct perception experiments, tracer experiments, and manipulations of patch quality and/or connectivity. Mesocosms can be relatively inexpensive to set up, and provide an arena in which meeting the criteria for good experimental design (control, replication, randomization) is often relatively easy. However, it can be challenging to scale inferences drawn from mesocosm experiments to larger scales. I offer suggestions to overcome these challenges and add more of a landscape focus to mesocosm experiments.
Curiouser and curiouser!
– Alice in Wonderland
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Wiersma, Y.F. (2022). Mesocosms. In: Experimental Landscape Ecology. Landscape Series, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95189-4_8
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