Climate and disturbance alter forest dynamics, from individual trees to biomes and from years to millennia, leaving legacies that vary with local, meso and macroscales. Motivated by recent insights in temperate forests, we argue that temporal and spatial extents equivalent to that of the underlying drivers are necessary to characterize forest dynamics across scales. We focus specifically on characterizing mesoscale forest dynamics because they bridge fine‐scale (local) processes and the continental scale (macrosystems) in ways that are highly relevant for climate change science and ecosystem management. We revisit ecological concepts related to spatial and temporal scales and discuss approaches to gain a better understanding of climate–forest dynamics across scales.