Landscape ecology: a new perspective on the researches of marine ecosystem
景观生态学:海洋生态系统研究的一个新视角

The global marine ecosystem as a giant heterogeneous and complex system is a landscape ecosystem with apparent hierarchical structure. It is reasonable to introduce the principles of landscape ecology to marine ecology. Now the scale of ecological study has been a restriction on the researches of marine ecology. The principles and methods of landscape ecology can be used to improve the researches of marine ecosystem in multiple scales.Marine landscape has three environmental gradients in the world ocean scale, including the latitudinal gradient in magnitude and seasonality of the solar radiation change with latitudes; the coast to the open water gradient often coincided with the variation in nutrients and mixing depth; the depth gradient from the sea surface to the abyssal sea bed, in which the depth of the water column illuminated by sunlight has important ecological effect on marine organisms. According to these gradients, the world ocean can be divided into several different ecological systems. The pattern and gradients of ocean indicated that ocean has great spatial heterogeneity.Several research directions of marine ecosystem based on the principles of landscape ecology were suggested, including the interaction among adjacent marine ecosystems, relation between the pattern and ecological process of ocean landscape, the impacts of global warming on marine landscape, and the protection of marine biodiversity.