This fourteenth edition of the BBVA Foundation's Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology has gone to the ecologists Lenore Fahrig, Simon Levin and Steward Pickett for incorporating the spatial dimension into ecosystem research, in the sense of landscape and its multiple scales, and bringing it to bear in the management of “coupled human-natural systems,” in the words of the citation.
Beginning in the 1970s, Levin worked to develop mathematical theories and models that could account for how species interact with and through the physical space they inhabit. The announcement highlights Levin’s paper “The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology,” published in 1992 in Ecology, as a turning point when ecological studies began to integrate different spatial scales, from local phenomena to global processes.
Santa Fe Institute press release