The broad goal of ecological research is to understand the dynamics of populations, communities, and ecosystems. Marine systems associated with the seafloor, especially on coastal hard substrata, have contributed substantially to this agenda. Here we discuss what in our judgment have been the important conceptual advances to come from research in benthic/demersal systems, the system-level characteristics and research approaches that have led to these contributions, the resulting strengths and limitations of current knowledge, and our opinions of what is both possible and necessary to move the field toward interesting and useful new horizons. Our focus is therefore directed towards temporal dynamics, the processes that explain them, and the level of success that our science can achieve in predicting those dynamics.

Marine systems associated with the seafloor occur from near the poles to the equator and from the intertidal zone to the deepest ocean bottom: thus they are necessarily characterized by immense taxonomic and physical variation. This variation can be categorized in numerous ways. We will divide it by substrate type-hard vs. unconsolidated (soft)--because this is a recurrent and reasonably dichotomous feature of marine benthic systems, and the methods used and many of the processes investigated segregate accordingly.

Reprinted with Permission from C.H. Peterson