Fig. 1

(a) Environmental disturbance regimes (including climate) across space and time scales with (b) biotic responses of forests. Disturbance events here include wildfire, wind damage, clearcut, flood, earthquake, etc. Blue shaded area is region of high predictability (sensu Wiens 1989), matching appropriate processes to disturbances at similar scales. Although landscapes may be viewed as scale independent, they are often viewed as a scale larger than stands in practice and encompass scales at which ecosystem processes connect forest mosaics (Lertzman and Fall 1998). (c) Classification of vegetation with scale. (d) Representative existing forest datasets by scale. Dashed lines divide conceptual scales from local to mega, including mesoscales (in red), which bridge the responses of vegetation from gaps and forest succession to species migration. Reprinted from Druckenbrod et al. (2019) with panels a-c adapted from original in Delcourt et al. (1983). See also Prentice (1992) for a similar analysis as in panel d