Multiscale ecology of agroecosystems is an emerging research field that can provide a stronger theoretical background for the integrated pest management. Reply to comments on "Multiscale approach to pest insect monitoring: random walks, pattern formation, synchronization, and networks".

We would like to thank all commentators for their insightful and thought-provoking commentaries [1–4] that also helped to further broaden the scope of our review [5] as well as to extend the list of references. We very much appreciate the positive comments on the relevance, timeliness and comprehensiveness of our work. Meanwhile, we want to emphasize that multiscale pest monitoring is an emerging research theme rather than a well-established one. Indeed, although the existence and importance of multiple scales has long been known in spatial ecology [6,7], their quantitative investigation has not started in full until relatively recently, e.g. see [8,9] and references therein. For this reason, in our review [5], several relevant aspects might have been either just touched briefly or not mentioned at all. In particular, Rebecca Tyson [1] rightfully brought attention to the importance of transient environmental factors, e.g. temperature, that may control the build-up of pest populations. The effects of temperature on the rates of insect development through their life-stages and on insect population growth are well-known [10, 11] and have been utilized in some empirical approaches used in Integrated Pest Management (IPM), e.g. in what is known as degree–day models [12,13]. Models of this type, however, are essentially based on average insect population