Table 1. Authors contributing to this special feature, their research purpose or question, the level of organization, interactions, study location, and major method of analysis. Author Research Question/Purpose Level of Organization Interaction Study Location Method of Analysis Washington-Allen et al. Which plant communities are resilient in the face of drought? Landscape Vegetation and drought Dryland Image differencing   Wardwell and Allen Are discontinuities in landscapes associated with discontinuities in body mass aggregations? Community-Landscape Birds and environmental gradients Wetland Textural discontinuity hypothesis, spatial analysis of variance   Johnson To determine the optimum scale for monitoring community dynamics. Community Marine organisms Marine/tropical Celluar automata, space-for-time substitution, prediction-r2and error-x analyses   Allen and Holling How does novelty contribute to system resilience? Multiple Cross-scale Cross-levels Multiple Panarchy theory   Garmestani et al. Do system discontinuities function as drivers of regime shifts and resilience? Social and ecological systems Cross-scale Cross-levels Multiple Analysis of discontinuities in space and time   Thomas et al. How do you mathematically describe both discrete and continuous population dynamics in the interactions among four different species? Community Mosquitoes, virus, humans, and birds Urban/Tropics Time-scale calculus model   Ridolfi et al. How do patterns of islands of fertility emerge at the landscape level? Landscape Soil erosion and vegetation encroachment Dryland Non-linear spatial diffusion simulation model   Lockwood and Lockwood What controls grasshopper population size, density-dependent or independent factors? Community-Landscape Grasshoppers, precipitation and temperature Dryland Catastrophe theory Self-organized criticality (1/f noise) Fractal analysis