IMPLICIT SCALING IN ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH : ON WHEN TO MAKE STUDIES OF MICE AND MEN

Ecology focuses on tangible organisms; ecological complexity results from the myriad of patterns with which the many different types of organisms interact in their environments. Yet ecology is by no means devoid of abstraction. To produce general principles out of the mass of complicated natural histories, ecology is replete with concepts, such as competition, evolution, and succession, and abstruse structures, such as communities and ecosystems. The diversity of organisms and ecological concepts has always threatened to bury ecologists in a profusion of special cases. However, the notion of scale offers a framework for ordering nature that may help reveal generalities from the mass of particulars. Whereas the idea of scale is intuitively familiar to ecologists, the vagueness of intuition has contributed to ambiguity in defining and understanding the concept. Although formal ecological treatment of scale has been initiated in a collection of ideas called hierarchy theory (Allen and Starr 1982, O'Neill et al. 1986, Pattee 1973), varying uses of scale remain in the ecological literature (see Carlile et Various concepts associate with

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