Conceptual framework (left), showing the five Themes of the Institute (1-5) as the transitions between biological scales. Each transition involves the interaction of biodiversity components (genes, leaves, species, communities, ecosystems) with environmental variation (global change forces) at different temporal and spatial scales resulting in emergent properties, which are the basis of biological variation at other scales. Three different concepts of biological scale (physiological, evolutionary, and ecological) are incorporated, as detailed in Fig. 2. The processes (right) by which smaller scale components generate emergent properties can be modeled based on state-of-the-art theories and observations in a suite of empirical systems, through an iterative process that advances theory, detection methods and the (re)design of empirical approaches.