Ecological Scale (Theory and Applications)

"WHY ARE WE STILL PUBLISHING BOOKS ON SCALE?" Upon en countering this recent addition to the ecological literature, the reader might well ask this question, posed by O'Neill and King in Chapter 1. As the editors state, the book was motivated by the fact that scale issues are implicit in nearly all ecological studies and applications, but such issues still are rarely articulated or quantified adequately. Furthermore, there existed no single source on how to deal with scale in a variety of disciplines, nor from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Hitting closer to home for readers of Forest Science, Lertzman and Fall assert in Chapter 16 that scale has rarely been dealt with explicitly in traditional studies of forestry and forest ecology. The editors aim to improve this situation by presenting a collection of papers that will raise awareness of the importance of incorporating scale concepts in ecological studies and applications. The book is the fifth volume, and the only edited collection, in the series Complexity in Ecological Systems. The book's 22 chapters were contributed by scholars and resource managers representing a wide range of disciplines. The chapters are divided into four parts that trend from theoretical to more applied treatments of the subject. Part I contains a synthesis of principles and terminology associated with ecological scale, an overview of methods for detecting scaledependent patterns, a clarification of relationships between levels in spatial ecology, and a conceptual approach to the problem of community organization. Part II focuses on the interpretation of multiple scales in particular ecological systems or areas of study, including paleoecology, soils, lakes and rivers, plant communities, animal populations, foodwebs, and ecological monitoring. Part III considers moving across scales in ecological inference and applications, from a variety of perspectives that include remote sensing, large mobile organisms, trees, forest stands and landscapes, and experimental design and data analysis. In Part IV, several examples of applications of scale concepts and issues to realworld problems are presented. There is something for everyone in Ecological Scale— researchers, students, and resource managers alike, including those who do not consider themselves ecologists.