Dungan et al.’s paper on scale introduced me to one new concept in particular, that some general guidelines could be followed to determine what might be an appropriate scale for a sample or experiment and what conclusions about processes could be drawn from the chosen scale. This concept is particularly important to me as a physical geographer as I have been reading many papers lately for a class on global biogeochemistry where global systems are examined and processes are inferred from experiments of different magnitudes, local and small or combining datasets from many areas. In the remaining readings for this course, I will now be more aware of the scale at which an experiment or study was conducted and will have a better idea when discussing the feasibility extrapolating or interpolating conclusions reached to other scales.
-Outdoor Addict