What's on the horizon for macroecology?

Over the last two decades, macroecology – the analysis of large-scale, multi-species ecological patterns and processes – has established itself as a major line of biological research. Analyses of statistical links between environmental variables and biotic responses have long and successfully been employed as a main approach, but new developments are due to be utilized. Scanning the horizon of macroecology, the European and Australian authors of this paper identified four challenges that will probably play a major role in the future. They support their claims by examples and bibliographic analyses. 1) Integrating the past into macroecological analyses, e.g. by using paleontological or phylogenetic information or by applying methods from historical biogeography, will sharpen our understanding of the underlying reasons for contemporary patterns. 2) Explicit consideration of the local processes that lead to the observed larger-scale patterns is necessary to understand the fine-grain variability found in nature, and will enable better prediction of future patterns (e.g. under environmental change conditions). 3) Macroecology is dependent on large-scale, high quality data from a broad spectrum of taxa and regions. More available data sources need to be tapped and new, small-grain large-extent data need to be collected. 4) Although macroecology already lead to mainstreaming cutting-edge statistical analysis techniques, they find that more sophisticated methods are needed to account for the biases inherent to sampling at large scale. Bayesian methods may be particularly suitable to address these challenges. To continue the vigorous development of the macroecological research agenda, it is time to address these challenges and to avoid becoming too complacent with current achievements. Authors: Jan Beck, Liliana Ballesteros-Mejia, Carsten M. Buchmann, Jürgen Dengler, Susanne A. Fritz, Bernd Gruber, Christian Hof, Florian Jansen, Sonja Knapp, Holger Kreft, Anne-Kathrin Schneider, Marten Winter and Carsten F. Dormann. J. Beck (jan.beck@unibas.ch) and L. Ballesteros-Mejia, Univ. of Basel, Dept of Environmental Sciences (Biogeography), CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland. – C. M. Buchmann, Univ. of Potsdam, Dept of Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation, DE-14469 Potsdam, Germany. – J. Dengler, Univ. of Hamburg, Biocentre Klein Flottbek and Botanical Garden, Biodiversity, Evolution and Ecology of Plants, DE-22609 Hamburg, Germany.– S. A. Fritz and C. Hof, Univ. of Copenhagen, Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Dept of Biology, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark. Present address of SAF and CH: Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) and Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, DE-60325 Frankfurt, Germany. – B. Gruber, Univ. of Canberra, Faculty of Applied Science, Inst. for Applied Ecology, ACT2601 Canberra, Australia. – F. Jansen, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Univ., Inst. of Botany and Landscape Ecology, DE-17487 Greifswald, Germany. – S. Knapp and M. Winter, UFZ – Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Dept of Community Ecology, DE-06120 Halle (Saale), Germany. – H. Kreft, Univ. of Göttingen, Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology, Biodiversity, Macroecology, and Conservation Biogeography group, DE-37077 Göttingen, Germany. – A.-K. Schneider, Leibniz-Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), DE-15374 Müncheberg, Germany. Present address for A-KS: Univ. of Potsdam, Inst. for Earth- and Environmental Sciences, DE-14476 Potsdam, Germany. – C. F. Dormann, UFZ – Helmholtz, Centre for Environmental Research, Dept of Computational Landscape Ecology, DE-04318 Leipzig, Germany and Univ. of Freiburg, Biometry and Environmental System Analysis, DE-79106 Freiburg, Germany