These labels broadly categorize positional as well as biological characteristics of the record and are fit for the purpose of big data macro-ecological analysis.
It has successfully produced macro-ecological patterns such as species-area relationships and species abundance distributions.
However, biogeographic and macro-ecological studies at the community level have shown that relatively few free-living microbial eukaryotes have cosmopolitan distributions [4], [5], [6], [7].
Flow cytometry has been used for quite a long time to estimate PPE abundance in the field, allowing for example derivation of macro-ecological patterns [20].
Therefore macro-ecological processes are at this stage of research more prominent than any biogeographical patterns, but the available data are too limited to draw conclusions.
For instance, water balance metrics [63], [64] have been shown to provide good discrimination of the occurrence, abundance, and diversity of some biota at macro-ecological scales [64].
Efforts to conserve island floras and to understand their diversity are crucially dependent on baseline taxonomic knowledge: species are the unit of conservation actions, the focus of phylogenetic and phylogeographic work and the basic units for macro-ecological analyses.
Population genetic structure was generally consistent with the known macro-ecological characteristics, with individuals from populations with similar vegetation types, temperature, precipitation and topography recovered in the same lineage [ 7, 18].
By applying macro-ecological principles on a micro-scale, we highlight the importance of strong environmental gradients on ecological processes on a micro-scale in gaps, as also observed in other systems (Bennie et al. 2008).
These mechanisms refer to the causal processes by which interactions among different factors in individuals' macro-ecological environment (e.g., alcohol outlets and type of drinking location) affect the social behaviors of individuals (Gruenewald et al. 2014).
Over the last few decades, however, with the development of satellite remote sensing techniques, the questions of efficient planetary and macro-regional ecological mapping and modeling and integration of multi-scale data have become especially pertinent.
