Ecological and geographical scale: parallels and potential for integration

Abstract

Scale has emerged as a major issue in both ecology and geography in recent decades. Little effort has been made to compare these parallel debates, however, or to seek an integrated conception of scale across the two disciplines. This paper argues that such an integration is possible, even between ecology and human geography—the subfield of geography seemingly most removed from ecological concerns and methods. In both disciplines, globalization has lent practical urgency to problems of scale, revealing deeper theoretical issues. Geographers have helped impel ecologists to take space and scale seriously, and the epistemological insight that scale is produced (rather than given a priori) should be applied to ecological as well as social phenomena. Ecologists' conceptual distinctions and methodological guidelines regarding scale, meanwhile, can help resolve `the scale question' in critical human geography. Scale is both a methodological issue inherent to observation (its epistemological moment) and an objective characteristic of complex interactions within and among social and natural processes (its ontological moment). These processes and interactions—rather than scale per se—should be the object of research, with particular attention to nonlinearities or thresholds of change.