Define Ecosystems science and large-scale ecology?

Many of today's most pressing problems are regional or global in nature including for instance, the effects of land cover and land use, carbon flow in ocean and atmospheric systems, the influences of climate change on species distributions, and the protection of ecosystems and humans from threats to bio-terrorist activities. Solving these problems is not trivial as the vast majority of empirical work has been done at fairly small scales (temporally and spatially). Certainly, it is frequently impractical or impossible to investigate these problems at regional scales. Additionally, the task is not trivial because ecosystems are composed of many interacting parts that can show very complex behaviors and may be sensitive to basic conditions and context.