PREFACE Takashi Kohyama Josep Canadell Dennis S. Ojima Louis F. Pitelka Forest ecosystems and environments: scaling up from shoot module to watershed Published online: 31 March 2005 Ó The Ecological Society of Japan 2005 Terrestrial ecosystems are experiencing rapid changes of their structure and function as a result of an ever growing pressure by human demands on natural re- sources. Over the past decades, forcing by direct and indirect human activities has reached a point that is now rivaling the natural forcing that has shaped the Earth system over millennia. This unprecedented phenomenon has attracted a major investment by the scientific com- munity to detect the impacts, attribute the changes to processes, and explore future trajectories. This scientific information is fundamental to creating the knowledge base that will inform policy development and will allow human societies to mitigate and adapt to these rapid changes. With the goal of developing a novel research agenda in support to the above objectives, the ‘‘Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems’’ core project (GCTE, Walker et al. 1999; Canadell et al. 2005) was created in 1991 under the auspices of the International Geosphere- Biosphere Programme (IGBP). By contrast with other components of the Earth system, terrestrial ecosystems are constructed with short-lived and long-lived organic compounds with varied diffusivity, resulting in pro- nounced spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Up scaling and integrating to global scales of such heterogeneous ecosystems in relation to global environmental change has been described and forecasted through the GCTE research agenda. Other aspects of heterogeneity come from hierarchi- cal and compositionally diversified features of terrestrial ecosystems. Plants create a vegetation framework with organismic hierarchy, from cell physiology to whole individual-level regulation, and biological components at each trophic level characterized by biodiversity related to compositional functional differentiation. Therefore, GCTE has promoted the integration and the study of feedbacks between processes driven by plant and ecosystem physiology, population and community dynamics, and biogeochemistry. The ‘‘Global Change Impacts on Terrestrial Ecosys- tems in Monsoon Asia’’ project (TEMA) (1995–2003) was the Japanese contribution to the GCTE global effort. Coastal East and Southeast Asia, as the target region of TEMA, are characterized by wet growing seasons influenced by monsoon climates, and species- rich forest ecosystems develop along a latitudinal gra- dient from equatorial to boreal zone, and an altitudinal gradient from lowland up to the forest limit (Ohsawa 1995). The TEMA aimed to predict the effects of envi- ronmental change on the distribution and structure of forest ecosystems in the target region (Hirose et al. 1998). Core parts of TEMA were designed to integrate forest ecosystem processes from leaf physiology to mi- cro-meteorological budgets, and to predict long-term changes of vegetation composition and architecture through demographic processes. The TEMA paid par- ticular attention to watershed processes, where forest metabolism affects ecosystem properties and biogeo- chemical budgets of freshwater ecosystems. This is particularly important because rivers, wetlands and lakes are experiencing direct and indirect effects of environmental change. The unique challenge of TEMA research was the attempt to integrate various scales of T. Kohyama (&) Graduate School of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0810, Japan E-mail: Kohyama@ees.hokudai.ac.jp J. Canadell Global Carbon Project, Earth Observation Centre, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research, GPO Box 3023, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia D. S. Ojima Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, NESB, B229, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1499, USA L. F. Pitelka Appalachian Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, 301 Braddock Road, Frostburg, MD 21532-2307, USA Ecol Res (2005) 20: 241–242 DOI 10.1007/s11284-005-0040-2