This note informs you of significant developments in the conceptualisation and analysis of vegetation dynamics. Over the past so many years we published papers on this under the umbrella title "Multiscale trajectory Analysis: a powerful conceptual tool for understanding change". I completed an overview of concepts and detailed description of techniques in an essay. I include many numerical examples to firmly ground Trajectory Analysis into applied vegetation research. Trajectory analysis is well suited in the pursuit of local and global studies of change because of its multivariate and multi-scale nature. To download the essay and some of the related papers please go to URL www.vegetationdynamics.com . The model at the basis of trajectory analysis is conceptually simple. When applied to time series vegetation data, the projectile becomes surrogate for vegetation state, the trajectory for the evolving vegetation process, and the properties of the trajectory for the true process characteristics. Notwithstanding its simplicity, the model is well-defined under natural circumstances and easily adapted to serial vegetation data, irrespective of source. As a major advantage, compared to other models that isolate the elementary processes and probe vegetation dynamics for informative regularities on the elementary levels, the trajectory model allows to probe for regularities on the level of highest process integrity. A rich list of key references are included in the essay and volumes of supplementary information in a Web Based Appendices, also downloadable from the URL identified. The list of keyword include attractor migration, determinism, fractal dimension, parallelism, periodicity, phase structure. Please use e-mail for communications ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
