Macrosystems Biology: an Emerging Perspective

Ecological Society Of America, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Macrosystems ecology is the study of ecological processes and their interactions with environmental processes at regional to global scales. This is a new field that has emerged in recent years to address problems that have been difficult to address through other perspectives, such as plot-level or single investigator research projects. The field is highly integrative, draws heavily from a wide range of ecological and other perspectives, requires critical attention to data management and informatics throughout the life of the project, includes models as central tools, and utilizes analytical approaches that can handle such complexity many of which are relatively new to ecology. This special issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, published by the Ecological Society of America, derives from a scientific meeting held in early 2012 that addressed the development of Macrosystems Ecology as a new field. The participants in that meeting have organized four overarching synthetic chapters and three more focused, illustrative project-level chapters to be included in the issue. Together, these papers will propose key concepts and theories that the field is exploring currently and some of the exciting research frontiers within the field of ecology and across disciplinary boundaries to other fields. The broader impacts include a conscious effort to involve more junior scientists as lead authors in order to contribute to the growth of this area into the future, as well as one chapter that will focus on the culture of highly collaborative research teams, a topic with broad importance to science in general.