The difficulty that humans have in perceiving and understanding large-scale phenomena is widely acknowledged. The need to study and understand processes associated with global environmental change has created an environment that has promoted unprecedented scientific co-operation between and within disciplines. The science of global change emphasises the need to understand the complex biophysical systems both in terms of components and as a whole. This has involved research at many levels of organisation, or scales, within each system. The need to link and integrate information between scales...