Technical Abstract: Extrapolation of information from sites to landscapes or regions is especially problematic in spatially and temporally heterogeneous ecosystems. Although linear extrapolations are the easiest and most cost-effective, other approaches are necessary when spatial location and contagious or neighborhood processes are important. Because landscape and regions consist of a mosaic of sites differing in spatial heterogeneity and degree of connectedness, we expect a combination of scaling approaches is needed to characterize these areas. Our goal was to develop a conceptual framework and operational approach to simplifying complex landscapes in order to minimize uncertainty in predictions. We illustrate our approach for arid and semiarid landscapes where spatial variation in carbon dynamics, in particular aboveground net primary production, is a timely and important problem.