Choose the best answer: Ecologist Simon Levin argued that scale is "the central problem in ecology" (Molles & Laursen p.3). This is because an ecological pattern that we observe, such as butterflies in a meadow, may demand different research tools and methods, be the result of bias and non-random sampling, be due to mechanisms operating at different scales in space and time, or be the consequence of innumerable biotic and abiotic factors, which cannot easily be quantified.