Abstract:

Virtually all ecological investigations are conducted and constrained within a range of time and space. This suggests that interpretations of the results must be specific and that extrapolations must be made with caution. We present a hypothetical example illustrating temporal and spatial interactions as confounding factors in ecological research. Through a series of case studies, we illustrate the importance of placing our hypotheses, results from testing those hypotheses, and our conclusions in relevant scales of time and space. Our case studies focus on the ecological effects of scale for determining pattern-process relationships in a montane spruce-fir forest in China, modeling forest canopy structure, predicting carbon flux in forests the Pacific Northwest, USA; detecting temporal scales of variation in carbon flux and meteorological data from deciduous forests in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA; and formulating conclusions from a long-term soil-warming experiment of peatlands in Minnesota, USA. We recommend additional efforts for examining ecological phenomena across multiple temporal and spatial scales.