Preface. Climate change impact on plant ecology

The variety and the number of ecological models is impressive, and several fields of exact sciences have been called upon to provide the technical and informatics tools that have made it possible to define their current and future developments. But even taking into consideration only a part of the ecosystem, such as the one assigned to primary production (first trophic level, photo-autotrophic compartment), our ability to simulate the processes that underlie carbon fixation in plants is limited by our current knowledge, determining a quantity of information or variability not explained by the model used, which underlies a sort of ‘Uncertainty Principle’ valid for the ecological sciences. The design of Nature and its state of apparent disorder at the various levels of hierarchical, spatial, and temporal scales is still far from being fully discovered. Although the word ‘uncertainty’ resonates widely in this paper, it can represent a very key source of information and the force that pushes us to try other ways to increase our level of knowledge and make our simulation and forecasting ability more and more accurate in a complex world.