Landscape Ecology - Toward a Science of Scaling in Landscape Ecology

Volume 38, issue 3, March 2023 (this opens in a new tab)

Issue editors: Amy E. Frazier, Peter Kedron, Mary K. Donovan

Background of the special issue

Landscape ecologists have spent decades examining how changes in the scale of spatial data (e.g., grain and extent) impact spatial patterns that are critical for landscape ecology investigations (Turner et al. 1989; Wu 2004; Saura 2004; Frazier 2016). Yet, beyond the identification and description of consistent relationships, there has been little use of these scaling relationships to predict values at unmeasured scales (Frazier 2014) or uncover generalizable insights into landscape structure and function across ecosystems. In short, our understanding of how measurement scale affects landscape analyses has progressed, but we have limited understanding of what is driving these relationships or how we might build generalizable knowledge about the predictability of data or landscape patterns from these relationships. In fact, in the seminal paper “Key issues and research priorities in landscape ecology: An idiosyncratic synthesis”, Wu and Hobbs (2002) identify scaling not scale as a key research priority, noting that “general ‘rules of thumb’ and specific techniques for scaling…need to be developed and tested more widely and rigorously.” Yet, nearly 20 years later, we lack a generalizable ‘science of scaling’ in landscape ecology that could contribute to this key priority.

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