A road map for synthesizing the scaling patterns in ecology

Abstract

Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify emerging ecological patterns and investigate their hidden mechanisms, we need to rely on the simplicity of mathematical language. This becomes especially apparent when dealing with scaling patterns in ecology. Indeed, nearly all of ecological patterns are scale dependent. Such scale dependence hampers our predictive power and creates problems in our inference. This challenge calls for a clear and fundamental understanding of how and why ecological patterns change across scales. As Simon Levin stated in his MacArthur Award lecture, the problem of relating phenomena across scales is the central problem in ecology and other natural sciences. It has become clear that there is currently a drive in ecology and complexity science to develop new quantitative approaches that are suitable for analysing and forecasting patterns of ecological systems. Here I provide a road map for future works on synthesizing the scaling patterns in ecology, aiming (i) to collect and sort a diverse array of ecological patterns, (ii) to present the dominant parametric forms of how these patterns change across spatial and temporal scales, (iii) to detect the processes and mechanisms using mathematical models, and finally (iv) to probe the physical meaning of these scaling patterns. This road map is divided into three parts and covers three main concepts of scale in ecology: heterogeneity, hierarchy and size. Using scale as a thread, this road map and its following works weave the kaleidoscope of ecological scaling patterns into a cohesive whole.