THEORY OF SPATIAL ECOLOGY AND THE APPLICATION TO THE STUDY ON BIOLOGICAL INVASION

As a new branch of contemporary ecology,spatial ecology has been getting involved in continuing development. Which emphasizes the importance of space in ecology progress, mainly including scale, spatial heterogeneity, spatial pattern and so on. Spatial models are applied widely in spatial ecology. Of which, Levins, Cellular Automata and Reaction Diffusion model are simple but important models. They can abstract different aspects of the essence of spatial ecology. The Levins model is only implicitly spatial because it assumes global dispersal, Cellular automata are created when Levins like models are made more realistic by including local dispersal. While the last considers interactions in a spatially continuous habitat. Many others models derived from them. Scale is one of the central problems in spatial ecology. Which includes spatial, temporal and organizational scales. There is no single natural scale at which ecological phenomena should be studied, and ecosystems generally show characteristic variability on different scales. Spatial heterogeneity is the result of ecological process on different scales, on the other hand, it also affect all kinds of process. Biological invasion has been identified as one of the direct causes of biodiversity loss in the global context. Scientists have gradually paid more attention to it. Theories of spatial ecology, especially some models have been used in the problem. Finally, the current problems and application trends of spatial ecology are also discussed.