Approaches to advance scientific understanding of macrosystems ecology

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org M ecological studies are conducted by measuring responses to stressors within populations, communities, or ecosystems. The interactions of basic building blocks of ecological systems – from atoms to organisms, with each other and with the environment – aggregate to form broad-scale ecological patterns. Local-scale research on these interactions is very important for scientists to understand the impacts of environmental change on ecological systems and the processes that shape these phenomena. However, environmental change operates across a range of local to broad scales, forcing ecologists to expand, adapt, and integrate approaches (Heffernan et al. 2014). Improving approaches for prediction is one of the goals of the emerging field of macrosystems ecology (MSE; Heffernan et al. 2014). MSE researchers study ecological systems as a whole and ask how processes and patterns at regional to continental scales interact, respond, and emerge from (and with) finer (eg individual) and broader (eg continental) system levels (Peters et al. 2007; Evans et al. 2012; Heffernan et al. 2014). Heffernan et al. (2014) describe the important conceptual underpinnings of a macrosystems perspective and its disciplinary foundations. Here, we illustrate the suite of data, approaches, and tools that can be used to address such research questions. Many of these approaches were unavailable 10–20 years ago, and are not commonly used by ecologists today. The methods we describe here differ from simple upscaling procedures used in early research efforts that laid the foundation for MSE, such as the 1970s International Biological Program, which funded large-scale ecosystem research projects studying the structure and function of key biomes (Hagen 1992; Golley 1993). These studies improved the understanding and development of ecology by refining methods; collecting large amounts of data on ecosystem components, processes, and interactions; and creating many successful, smaller-scale systems models (Golley 1993). However, their upscaling approaches were limited by data resources, analytical tools, and computer capabilities. Ecologists are now able to develop and use technologies to incorporate the complex organization and interactions across scales necessary for interpreting macroscale phenomena (Hagen 1992). MSE studies explore how broad-scale variation in finescale characteristics – such as organismal behavior and fitness, nutrient transformations, and water-use efficiency – relate to broad-scale spatial and temporal processes and patterns such as climate change, landscape alteration, and MACROSYSTEMS ECOLOGY