Biodiversity monitoring, earth observations, and the ecology of scale

Human activity and land use change are dramatically altering the sizes, geographic distributions, and functioning of biological populations worldwide, with tremendous consequences for human well-being. Yet our ability to measure, monitor, and forecast biodiversity change – crucial to addressing it – remains limited. Biodiversity monitoring systems are being developed to improve this capacity by deriving metrics of change from an array of in situ data (e.g., field plots or species occurrence records) and Earth observations (EO; e.g., satellite or airborne imagery). However, there are few ecologically-based frameworks for integrating these data into meaningful metrics of biodiversity change. Here, I describe how concepts of pattern and scale in ecology could be used to design such a framework. I review three core topics: the role of scale in measuring and modeling biodiversity patterns with EO, scale-dependent challenges linking in situ and EO data, and opportunities to apply concepts of ...