The researchers studied different types of secondary forests in Daxing'anling, China to understand how trees are distributed and how this changes with scale. They found that one type of forest had good regeneration, while the others did not. The distribution of trees within each forest type was not stable, and different tree sizes showed different clustering patterns. The size of non-dominant species' patterns was larger than dominant species, and the distribution of younger trees was larger than older trees. Overall, the forests studied were not in a stable state, with varying patterns of tree distribution across different scales.