Landscape ecology mainly deal with the realtionship between landscape pattern and ecological processes. However, because of the difficulty on ecological process quantification from various scales, few achievements were made. To clearlify the relationship between landscape pattern and ecological processes at different scales, a key bottleneck to be resolved was the methodology on how to extend ecological rule from small scales to large scales. Due to the complexity of scale effects and the uncertainty of scale change, few scientific methods on scale change were established despite years of substantial research efforts.
Landscape pattern analysis and scale change are one of the core issues in ecology and geography. However, due to the complexity of scale impact and the uncertainty of scale change, an appropriate method is yet to be found even though much research effort has been given toward this issue. There are existing two misunderstandings in scale change. The first one tends to overly emphasize the effect of spatial scale change while ignore the effect of process scale change. The second one is to pay too much attention on the extrapolation of quantitative relationships among different scales, but lack of understanding about the ecological impact of different scales. This research points out a new idea, based on the systematic analyses on the previous studies on landscape pattern and scale change, that is to conduct landscape pattern analyses and scale change for a particular ecological process using pattern recognition approach. We believe that the key issue in scale change is to establish relationships between the pattern and process for each scale and the relationships between the patterns of different scales through identifying dominant factors of ecological processes at each scale. A new scaling mechanism can be established after the database of environment-pattern-process pattern recognition was built.