Rescaling Biology: Increasing Integration Across Biological Scales and Subdisciplines to Enhance Understanding and Prediction. (2nd September 2021)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Rescaling Biology: Increasing Integration Across Biological Scales and Subdisciplines to Enhance Understanding and Prediction. (2nd September 2021)
- Main Title:
- Rescaling Biology: Increasing Integration Across Biological Scales and Subdisciplines to Enhance Understanding and Prediction
- Authors:
- St. Mary, Colette
Powell, Thomas H Q
Kominoski, John S
Weinert, Emily - Abstract:
- Synopsis: The organization of the living world covers a vast range of spatiotemporal scales, from molecules to the biosphere, seconds to centuries. Biologists working within specialized subdisciplines tend to focus on different ranges of scales. Therefore, developing frameworks that enable testing questions and predictions of scaling requires sufficient understanding of complex processes across biological subdisciplines and spatiotemporal scales. Frameworks that enable scaling across subdisciplines would ideally allow us to test hypotheses about the degree to which explicit integration across spatiotemporal scales is needed for predicting the outcome of biological processes. For instance, how does genomic variation within populations allow us to explain community structure? How do the dynamics of cellular metabolism translate to our understanding of whole-ecosystem metabolism? Do patterns and processes operate seamlessly across biological scales, or are there fundamental laws of biological scaling that limit our ability to make predictions from one scale to another? Similarly, can sub-organismal structures and processes be sufficiently understood in isolation of potential feedbacks from the population, community, or ecosystem levels? And can we infer the sub-organismal processes from data on the population, community, or ecosystem scale? Concerted efforts to develop more cross-disciplinary frameworks will open doors to a more fully integrated field of biology. In this paper,Synopsis: The organization of the living world covers a vast range of spatiotemporal scales, from molecules to the biosphere, seconds to centuries. Biologists working within specialized subdisciplines tend to focus on different ranges of scales. Therefore, developing frameworks that enable testing questions and predictions of scaling requires sufficient understanding of complex processes across biological subdisciplines and spatiotemporal scales. Frameworks that enable scaling across subdisciplines would ideally allow us to test hypotheses about the degree to which explicit integration across spatiotemporal scales is needed for predicting the outcome of biological processes. For instance, how does genomic variation within populations allow us to explain community structure? How do the dynamics of cellular metabolism translate to our understanding of whole-ecosystem metabolism? Do patterns and processes operate seamlessly across biological scales, or are there fundamental laws of biological scaling that limit our ability to make predictions from one scale to another? Similarly, can sub-organismal structures and processes be sufficiently understood in isolation of potential feedbacks from the population, community, or ecosystem levels? And can we infer the sub-organismal processes from data on the population, community, or ecosystem scale? Concerted efforts to develop more cross-disciplinary frameworks will open doors to a more fully integrated field of biology. In this paper, we discuss how we might integrate across scales, specifically by (1) identifying scales and boundaries, (2) determining analogous units and processes across scales, (3) developing frameworks to unite multiple scales, and (4) extending frameworks to new empirical systems. … (more)
- Is Part Of:
- Integrative and comparative biology. Volume 61:Number 6(2021)
- Journal:
- Integrative and comparative biology
- Issue:
- Volume 61:Number 6(2021)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 61, Issue 6 (2021)
- Year:
- 2021
- Volume:
- 61
- Issue:
- 6
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2021-0061-0006-0000
- Page Start:
- 2031
- Page End:
- 2037
- Publication Date:
- 2021-09-02
- Subjects:
- Zoology -- Periodicals
Biology -- Periodicals
Physiology, Comparative -- Periodicals
590.5 - Journal URLs:
- http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/ ↗
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/ ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1093/icb/icab191 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 1540-7063
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 4531.816565
British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 25817.xml