Fig. 1.

Scales in the phyllosphere. Patterns such as clumped spatial distributions of bacterial populations or communities arise from ecological processes that occur at the individual level. Scale-explicit ecological concepts such as patch dynamics or species-area relationships can link the different levels across scales, but have not been explored fully for the phyllosphere yet. The two photographs show individual bacteria of two different strains (green and red) that have been inoculated on bean leaves, with the leaf topography visible in the background and a leaf vein in light grey in the lower right corner of the lower photograph. White bars correspond to 20 μm. Photographs by Daniel Esser (color figure online)