Efforts to deduce the appropriate scales of ecosystem functions and how patterns change with scale have a long history in ecology and landscape ecology (Levin 1992, O'Neill et al. 1996). Ecosystem function models are critical to predicting ecosystem responses to global change, but are limited by the technical challenges of model–data synthesis. Accurately relating phenomena across multiple scales is an important challenge in ecological modeling, as information is lost when converting between scales of analysis. Researchers must determine how much information is necessary to preserve the landscape signature of the ecological processes under study.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.