A central aim of ecology is to characterise and explain how species interact with each other and their environment and looking at how these interactions scale up to shape global patterns of biodiversity is the key idea behind the study of macroecology. In this talk I will be discussing what it means to do macroecology using my own research to highlight different questions, methods, and approaches in this rapidly developing field. These “explorations” into macroecological research will include looking at global patterns of species richness and functional diversity in lizards, the pollination ecology of Proteaceae in the Southwest Australian biodiversity hotspot and using simulation models to reconstruct historical evolutionary events such as the geography of speciation.