| Abstract: | Global change research and sustainable development need to be addressed at larger scales in the light of small scale process studies. Much remains to be done before the small scale, process level understanding of ecosystem responses to global change can be reliably translated to larger scales. The paper reviews the status of scaling issues and tries to find how to extrapolate our observations and our findings at site scale up to regional scale and provide ecological information and interpretations at the regional scale. An integrated approach to scaling-up from site to region is proposed combining hierarchical theory, landscape ecology, remote sensing, geographical information system (GIS) with process/mechanistic modeling. Remote sensing and GIS will play key roles in spatial analysis, integration as well as cross scale modeling. |
