Introduction
Looking out over a community such as a rocky intertidal zone on the Northern California coast, it is obvious that the locations of species on the shoreline are influenced not only by physical factors, such as tide height and wave action, but also by a variety of biological interactions.
Sea stars eat sessile mussels in the low intertidal zone, thus limiting them to the higher intertidal zones. In those zones, the crevices between mussels provide habitat for many species that otherwise would be absent. Local conditions such as these are important regulators of species distributions. However, as important as these conditions appear to us, we must always be cognizant of the influence of processes operating at larger geographic scales. Oceanographic processes, such as currents and ocean upwelling, regulate the delivery of invertebrate larvae to rocky shorelines. At a global scale, oceanic circulation patterns control current direction. By limiting dispersal, those patterns can isolate species over ecological and evolutionary time. As a result, the local assemblage of species on the Northern California coast is ultimately based on a foundation of global and regional processes. In this chapter, we will consider the effects of these large- scale geographic processes on one of the most recognizable ecological patterns known: the distribution and diversity of species on Earth.
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- Hare C., Neo D. (eds.). Trade Finance: Technology, Innovation and Documentary Credit. Oxford University Press,2021. — 417 p., 2021
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