In their exploration of scale issues, ecologists have come to question the traditionally defined levels of cell, organism, population, community, ecosystem, landscape, biome, and biosphere that have been the major organizing concepts in biology. In this scheme, higher levels on a conceptual scale also tend to be larger on a spatial scale. A larger size, however, does not always correspond to a higher level on a conceptual scale. A simple example is that of an ant colony found in a tree. As part of this effort, ecologists have noted that nature does not seem to operate in a seamless web, which would require a full understanding of processes at all levels in order to explain and predict the outcomes of natural processes.
Many processes produce clusters of entities, generated by a small set of self-organizing processes.
Along the same transect, measurements were taken at different intervalsand yielded different patterns. Based on discussions found in O'Neill et al. A sample of a forest landscape model composed of a matrix of sites. Fire organizes and maintains the landscape as a mosaic of patches composed of even-aged sites. The sites making up the landscape are each shaded by age.