Do spatial scale and life history affect fish-habitat relationships?

1. Understanding how animals interact with their environment is a fundamental ecological question with important implications for conservation and management. The relationships between animals and their habitat, however, can be scale dependent. If ecologists work at suboptimal spatial scales, they will gain an incomplete picture of how animals respond to the landscape. Identifying the scale at which animal-landscape relationships are strongest (the ‘scale of effect’) will improve our ability to better plan management and conservation activities. 2. Several recent studies have greatly enhanced our knowledge about the scale of effect, and the potential drivers of inter-specific variability, in particular life-history traits. However, while many marine systems are inherently multi-scalar, research into the scale of effect has been mainly focussed on terrestrial taxa. As the scales of observation in fish-habitat association studies are often selected based on convention rather than biologic...