Abstract
Macroecology deals with ecological patterns and processes on large spatial and temporal scales. Since its development has been promoted by the suitability of appropriate data on these scales, i.e. mostly the data on bird distribution and abundances, macroecology is largely confined to large-scale ecology of birds.
We review major achievements of bird macroecology that concern patterns in interspecific and intraspecific differences in population abundances, relationship between population densities and extent of species occurrence, spatiotemporal variability of abundances and major patterns in faunal structure and bird species richness on the Earth surface. Many of the patterns are documented using bird distributional data from the Czech Republic.
Macroecology is shown to be important not only for its own sake, but also for understanding small-scale ecological phenomena since these are largely derived just from the large-scale patterns and processes.