摘要：Discontinuous structure in landscapes may result in discontinuous, aggregated species body-mass patterns, reflecting the scales of structure available to animal communities within a landscape. Theedges of these body-mass aggregations reflect transitions between available scales of landscape structure.Such transitions, or scale breaks, are theoretically associated with increased biological variability. Wehypothesized that variability in population abundance is greater in animal species near the edge of body-mass aggregations than it is in species that are situated in the interior of body-mass aggregations. We testedthis hypothesis by examining both temporal and spatial variability in the abundance of species in the birdcommunity of the Florida Everglades sub-ecoregion, USA. Analyses of both temporal and spatial variabilityin population abundance supported our hypothesis. Our results indicate that variability within complexsystems may be non-random, and is heightened where transitions in scales of process and structure occur.This is the first explicit test of the hypothetical relationship between increased population variability andscale breaks
