The greater ecological validity of the stimuli, and the inclusion of another "distractor" dimension in the stimuli, however, might enhance the robustness of what is learned and facilitate transfer to more "real-world" situations.
Ecological resilience or robustness has also become central to conservation practices and ecosystem management, particularly as the latter has shifted its attention to the importance of ecosystem services.
The resilience or robustness of ecological systems has been an important concept in ecology and natural history since the time of British naturalist Charles Darwin, who described the interdependencies between species as an "entangled bank" in his influential work On the Origin of Species (1859).
However, very little work on the performance and robustness of ecological indicators has been carried out.
The robustness of ecological landscape analyses will increase as methods are devised that remove the subjectivity with which observational scales are defined and selected.
Our results demonstrate that fish fundamentally change their swimming behaviour over time, and that acclimation and observational timeframes may therefore have implications for influencing both the ecological relevance and statistical robustness of behavioural toxicity tests.
Describing complex ecosystems as networks of interacting components and explaining the structure of those interaction networks is an essential part of understanding the role of biodiversity in the function and robustness of ecological communities [1], [2].
To test the robustness of these ecological processes at another geographic setting (45°N) using a species from another family within the suspension-feeding guild (Myidae), we performed a short-term field manipulation at an intertidal mud flat in eastern Maine, USA.
