Alexander Popp, Niels Blaum, Stephanie Domptail, Nicole Herpel, Alexander Gröngröft, T. T. Hoffman, Norbert Jürgens, Sue Milton, Ernst-August Nuppenau, Eva Rossmanith, Michael Schmidt, Melanie Vogel, Katrin Vohland, Florian Jeltsch

• Decisions for the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable management of natural resources are typically related to large scales, i.e. the landscape level. However, understanding and predicting the effects of land use and climate change on scales relevant for decision-making requires to include both, large scale vegetation dynamics and small scale processes, such as soil-plant interactions. Integrating the results of multiple BIOTA subprojects enabled us to include necessary data of soil science, botany, socio-economics and remote sensing into a high resolution, process-based and spatially-explicit model. Using an example from a sustainably-used research farm and a communally used and degraded farming area in semiarid southern Namibia we show the power of simulation models as a tool to integrate processes across disciplines and scales.