“Scaling” means different things to different ecologists, but three broad ways of scaling are apparent in contemporary ecological research. First, scaling reflects experiments and observations at different spatial and temporal grains or extents. Second, dimensionless parameters describing consistent relationships between variables provide scale-free linkages between pattern and process. Third, scaling extends information gleaned from detailed study of model systems at multiple levels of biological organization to other organisms and systems that share common ancestry, biophysical constraints, or simply are more difficult to work with. Our 25 years of work with Sarracenia purpurea and its inquiline food web (the “Sarracenia microecosystem”) illustrates these different ways of scaling and suggests many avenues for ecological research and its application to ongoing and forecast environmental challenges.
Results/Conclusions
First, the entire microecosystem—the plant and an associated web of species (inquilines) that are consistently associated with this microhabitat—occurs from Florida to Labrador to British Columbia, spanning 3.5 x 106 km2, multiple biomes, and climatic regimes. This unique feature of the Sarracenia microecosystem has let us pose and address key questions for community ecology that depend on spatial and temporal grain: [1] How does a dynamic (living and changing) habitat act as a “filter” for trait-based community assembly? [2] Can we add habitat dynamics as another dimension into models of multi-layer networks? [3] Does the inclusion of intraspecific variability alter food-web dynamics in the Sarracenia microecosystem, as it does in many others? Second, scale-free analyses of traits and stoichiometry have revealed flexibility in stoichiometric “rules” and intraspecific deviations from global spectra of leaf traits. An open question is whether stoichiometric homeostasis really is scale-free. Finally, like other model organisms, the Sarracenia microecosystem is easy to propagate and grow in the lab and the field. The ability to do replicated experiments on entire ecosystems has led to a clearer understanding of the impacts of habitat size and top predator removal on aquatic ecosystems (e.g., “fishing down the food web”) and to the development of an experimental system for detecting tipping points and forestalling undesirable regime shifts.
The Sarracenia microecosystem has yielded important insights into fundamental ecological processes ranging from nutrient stoichiometry and atmospheric deposition, through demography and community assembly, to tipping points and ecosystem function. Further study and scaling of this model ecological system will continue to open up new avenues for ecological research and its application.