In an era of unprecedented human impacts on the planet, macrosystems biology (MSB) was developed to understand ecological patterns and processes within and across spatial and temporal scales. We used machine‐learning and qualitative literature review approaches to evaluate the thematic composition of MSB from articles published since the 2010 creation of the US National Science Foundation’s MSB Program. The machine‐learning analyses revealed that MSB articles studied scale and human components similarly to six ecology subdisciplines, indicating that MSB has deep ecological roots. A comparison with 84,841 ecological studies demonstrated that MSB has extended the knowledge space of ecology by examining large‐scale patterns and processes alongside anthropogenic factors, which was also confirmed by the qualitative literature review approach. Our analyses indicated that MSB emphasizes large scales, has deep roots in ecological disciplines, and may emerge as a new research frontier, but this last point has yet to be proven.

中文翻译：

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宏观系统生物学的演变

在人类对地球产生前所未有的影响的时代，开发了宏观系统生物学（MSB），以了解时空尺度内以及跨时空尺度的生态模式和过程。自2010年美国国家科学基金会的MSB计划创建以来，我们使用机器学习和定性文献综述方法评估了MSB的主题构成。机器学习分析表明，MSB文章对规模和人为成分的研究类似于六个生态子学科，表明MSB具有深厚的生态根源。与84,841个生态学研究的比较表明，MSB通过检查大规模模式和过程以及人为因素来扩展了生态学的知识空间，这也被定性文献综述方法所证实。