- Unprecedented Challenges in Ecological Research: Past and Present -- Structural Equation Modeling and Ecological Experiments -- Approaches to Predicting Broad-Scale Regime Shifts Using Changing Pattern-Process Relationships Across Scales -- Integrating Multiple Spatial Controls and Temporal Sampling Schemes To Explore Short- and Long-Term Ecosystem Response to Fire in an Everglades Wetland -- Bayesian Hierarchical/Multilevel Models for Inference and Prediction Using Cross-System Lake Data -- Avian Spatial Responses to Forest Spatial Heterogeneity at the Landscape Level: Conceptual and Statistical Challenges -- The Role of Paleoecology in Whole-Ecosystem Science -- A Spatially Explicit, Mass-Balance Analysis of Watershed-Scale Controls on Lake Chemistry -- Forecasting and Assessing the Large-Scale and Long-Term Impacts of Global Environmental Change on Terrestrial Ecosystems in the United States and China -- Gradual Global Environmental Change in the Real World and Step Manipulative Experiments in Laboratory and Field: The Necessity of Inverse Analysis -- Ecology in the Real World: How Might We Progress?.

Increasingly, ecosystem management and restoration efforts require understanding ecological processes that occur at large temporal and spatial scales. These phenomena are difficult to study using traditional statistical approaches that require randomization, replication, and control conditions. This book presents nine case studies highlighting new quantitative tools that scientists can apply to the design and analysis of large-scale, long-term experiments. Each case study identifies inherent constraints posed by traditional experimental tools and then suggests solutions that match appropriate novel experimental designs and analyses to the research questions. A conceptual framework has emerged from these studies relating spatial and temporal scales of scientific questions to methods, available data, and current knowledge about processes and mechanisms. This book provides invaluable guidance to ecologists who conceptualize, design, analyze, and synthesize real world ecological research.