Using Mechanistic Models to Scale Ecological Processes across Space and Time

Human activities affect the natural environment at local to global scales. To understand these effects, knowledge derived from short-term studies on small plots needs to be projected to much broader spatial and temporal scales. One way to project short-term, plot-scale knowledge to broader scales is to embed that knowledge in a mechanistic model of the ecosystem. The National Science Foundation's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network makes two vital contributions to this type of modeling effort: (1) a commitment to multidisciplinary research at individual sites, which results in a broad range of mutually consistent data, and (2) long-term data sets essential for estimating rate constants for slow ecosystem processes that dominate long-term ecosystem dynamics. In this article, we present four examples of how a mechanistic approach to modeling ecological processes can be used to make projections to broader scales. The models are all applied to sites in the LTER Network.