  Ecological spatial patterns reflect the underlying processes that shape the
structure of species and communities. Mechanisms like inter and intra species
competition, dispersal and host-pathogen interactions are believed to act over
a wide range of scales, and the inference of the process from the pattern is,
despite its popularity, a challenging task. Here we call attention to a quite
unexpected phenomenon in the extensively studied tropical forest at the
Barro-Colorado Island (BCI): the spatial deployment of (almost) all tree
species is statistically equivalent, once distances are normalized by , the
typical distance between neighboring conspecific trees. Correlation function,
cluster statistics and nearest-neighbor distance distribution become
species-independent after this rescaling. Global observables (species
frequencies) and local spatial structure appear to be interrelated. This
"glocality" suggests a radical interpretation of recent experiments that show a
correlation between species' abundance and the negative feedback among
conspecifics. For the forest to be glocal, the negative feedback must govern
spatial patterns over all scales.
