Author Archives: Charles Krebs

On Journal Referees

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I have been an editor of enough ecological journals to know the problems of referees first hand. The start is to try to find a referee for a particular paper. I would guess now that more than two-thirds of scientists asked to referee a potential paper say they do not have time. This leads to another question of why no one has any time to do anything, but that is a digression. If one is fortunate you get 2 or 3 good referees.

The next problem comes when the reviews of the paper come back. Besides dealing with the timing of return of the reviews, there are four rules which ought to be enforced on all referees. First, review the potential paper as it is. Do not write a review saying this is what you should have written- that is not your job. Second, if the paper is good enough, be positive in making suggestions for improvement. If it is not good enough in your opinion, try to say so politely and suggest alternate journals. Perhaps the authors are aiming for a journal that is too prestigious. Third, do not say in so many words that the author should cite the following 4 papers of mine…. And fourth, do not make ad hominem attacks on the authors. If you do not like people from Texas, this is not the place to take it out on the particular authors who happen to live there.

Given the reviews, the managing editor for the paper ought to make a judgment. Some reviews do not follow the four rules above. A good editor discards these and puts a black mark on the file of that particular reviewer. I would not submit a referee’s review to the authors if it violated any of the above 4 rules. I have known and respected editors who operated this way in the past.

The difficulty now is that ecological journals are overrun. This is driven in part by the desire to maximize the number of papers one publishes in order to get a job, and in part by journals not wanting to publish longer papers. Journals do not either have the funding or the desire to grow in relation to the number of users. This typically means that papers are sent out for reviews with a note attached saying that we have to reject 80% or so of papers regardless of how good they are, a rather depressing order from above. When this level of automatic rejection is reached, the editor in chief has the power to reject any kinds of papers not in favour at the moment. I like models so let’s publish lots of model papers. Or I like data so let’s publish only a few model papers.

One reason journals are overrun is that many of the papers published in our best ecology journals are discussions of what we ought to be doing. They may be well written but they add nothing to the wisdom of our age if they simply repeat what has been in standard textbooks for the last 30 years. In days gone by, many of these papers I think might have been given as a review seminar, possibly at a meeting, but no one would have thought that they were worthy of publication. Clearly the editors of some of our journals think it is more important to talk about what to do rather than to do it.

I think without any empirical data that the quality of reviews of manuscripts has deteriorated as the number of papers published has increased. I often have to translate reviews for young scientists who are devastated by some casual remark in a review. “Forget that nonsense, deal with this point as it is important, ignore this insult to your supervisor, go have a nice glass of red wine and relax, ……”. One learns how to deal with poor reviews.

I have been reading Bertram Murray’s book “What Were They Thinking? Is Population Ecology a Science?” (2011), unfortunately published after he died in 2010. It is a long diatribe about reviews of some of his papers and it would be instructive for any young ecologist to read it. You can appreciate why Murray had trouble with some editors just from the subtitle of his book, “Is Population Ecology a Science?” It illustrates very well that even established ecologists have difficulty dealing with reviews they think are not fair. In defense of Murray, he was able to get many of his papers published, and he cites these in this book. One will not come away from this reading with much respect for ornithology journals.

I think if you can get one good, thoughtful review of your manuscript you should be delighted. And if you are rejected from your favourite journal, try another one. The walls of academia could be papered with letters of rejection for our most eminent ecologists, so you are in the company of good people.

Meanwhile if you are asked to referee a paper, do a good job and try to obey the four rules. Truth and justice do not always win out in any endeavour if you are trying to get a paper published. At least if you are a referee you can try to avoid these issues.

Barto, E. Kathryn, and Matthias C. Rillig. 2012. “Dissemination biases in ecology: effect sizes matter more than quality.” Oikos 121 (2):228-235. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0706.2011.19401.x.

Ioannidis, John P. A. 2005. “Why most published research findings are false.” PLoS Medicine 2 (8):e124.

Medawar, P.B. 1963. “Is the scientific paper a fraud?” In The Threat and the Glory, edited by P.B. Medawar, 228-233. New York: Harper Collins.

Merrill, E. 2014. “Should we be publishing more null results?” Journal of Wildlife Management 78 (4):569-570. doi: 10.1002/jwmg.715.

Murray, Bertram G., Jr. 2011. What Were They Thinking? Is Population Ecology a Science? Infinity Publishing. 310 pp. ISBN 9780741463937

 

When Should One Retire from a University Appointment?

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In the good old days universities had a hard retirement policy that once you reached age 65 you were retired whether you liked it or not. Then in the age of entitlement it was declared that this was discrimination on the basis of age and thus could not be allowed. Universities bemoaned the fact that they had no firm financial projections under the new policy, and many different policies were introduced partly to solve this problem. In some cases you could gradually go to half-time, and then at some age to quarter time, until you eventually did retire, but most of these policies were voluntary.

It is useful to look at the broad picture that these changes produced in the university community. If there was indeed some general plan of development in a particular discipline like zoology, committees could lay out a future hiring plan but it was usually chaos because the time frame was so uncertain. So in my experience most carefully thought out hiring plans went out the window and hiring became ad hoc with the accompanying ‘departmental drift’. So, as a hypothetical example, if a professor in entomology retired, he or she might get replaced by a young assistant professor in microbial genetics.

On a larger scale, we need to look carefully at the consequences of keeping older professors on the books commandeering relatively large salaries. There are no clear rules but in general one might recognize professors that are worn out at age 55 and ought to retire, others that are happy to stop at 65 and relax more, and others who ask to stay on indefinitely. Every case is an individual one. Some of the age 55 scientists are still vigorous and any concerned department ought to work to make their life easier so they can continue to work. Others of the same age should be encouraged to go. The same should occur at age 65. The worry I have most is about those over 65. I give no names but I can list brilliant scientists who continued to be paid and work until they were 75 or 80. I can also list scientists who were brilliant in their time but had passed the gate by 65 (or even 55) but insisted in taking up a position for many years after age 65. This is a tragedy for the individual, for the department, and in particular for young scientists looking for a university position but finding none because the money is tied up in professors well past their use-by-date. I would expect that the only possible solution to this issue is for the university to evaluate every professor over 55 with strict demands of performance if they wish to remain on the payroll and to do this on a 1 or 2 year timetable. No one likes doing such evaluations so perhaps the university would have to hire one of the many hard-nosed CEOs of companies that are seen to be effective at firing all their workers.

None of this is to say that any and all professors who have retired at age 55, 65, 75, or 85 should not be encouraged to continue research work, but they must do it on their retirement savings. In my youth I met a 98 year old Drosophila researcher who was continuing to do valuable research in his long retirement. In Canada the federal research agencies do not seem to care how old you are when they evaluate the quality of your research work and contributions to science, so they at least do not appear to discriminate in awarding research funds on the basis of age. Scientific journals do not ask you how old you are when you submit a potential scientific paper.

There has always been a paradigm that scientific advances are made entirely by young scientists, so that, as the joke goes, almost all mathematicians should be shot after age 30 (that is a joke….). In at least some of the ecological sciences this age paradigm is not correct, but nevertheless I think it is morally recumbent on older professors to realize that their time on the payroll should be limited in order to release funds for the aspiring young scientists who can rejuvenate university departments.

Some Reflections on Evo-Eco

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Some ecologists study evolutionary processes and we call them evolutionary ecologists. They have their own journals and are a thriving field of science. Other ecologists study populations, communities, and ecosystems in ecological time and do not in general concern themselves with evolutionary changes.The question is should they? Evo-Eco is a search for evolutionary changes that have a decisive impact on observable ecological changes like that of a collapsing bird population.

There are two schools of thought. The first is that evo-eco is very important and the changes that ecologists are trying to understand are partly caused by ecological mechanisms like predation and competition but are also associated with genetic changes that affect survival and reproduction. Consequently an ecologist studying the declining bird population should study both genetics and ecology. The second school of thought is that evo-eco is rarely of any importance in causing ecological changes, so that we can more or less ignore genetics if we wish to understand why this bird population is disappearing.

A practical problem immediately rears its head. To be safe we should all follow evo-eco in case genetics is involved in dynamics. But given the number of problems that ecologists face, the number of scientists available to analyse them, and the research dollars available it is rare to have the time, energy or money to take the comprehensive route. Conservation ecologists are perhaps the most tightly squeezed of all ecologists because they have no time to spare. Environmental managers request answers about what to do, and the immediate causes of conservation problems are (as everyone knows) habitat loss, introduced pests and diseases, and pollution.

The consequence of all this is that the two schools of thought drift apart. I cannot foresee any easy way to solve this issue. Progress in evolutionary ecology is often very slow and knowing the past rarely gives us much insight into predicting the human-affected future. Progress in conventional ecology is faster but our understanding is based on short-term studies of unknown generality for future events. Both schools of thought race along with mathematical models that may or may not tell us anything about the real world, but are conceptually elegant and in a pinch might be called progress if we had time to test them adequately.

The most useful evo-eco approach has been to look at human-caused selection via fishing for large sized fish or hunting for Dall sheep with the largest horns. The overuse of antibiotics for human sickness and as prophylactics for our farm animals is another classic case in which to understand the ecological dynamics we need to know the evolutionary changes that we humans have caused. These are clear cases in which genetic insights can teach us very much.

I end with a story from my past. In the 1950s, nearly 70 years ago now, Dennis Chitty working at Oxford on population fluctuations in small grassland rodents considered that he could reject most of the conventional explanations for animal population changes, and he suggested that individuals might change in quality with population density. This change he thought might involve genetic selection for traits that were favourable only in high density populations that reappeared every 3-4 years. So in some strange sense he was one of the earliest evo-eco ecologists. The result was that he was nearly laughed out of Oxford by the geneticists in control. The great evolutionary geneticist E.B. Ford told Chitty he was completely mad to think that short term selection was possible on a scale to impact population dynamics. Genetic changes took dozens to hundreds of years at the best of time. There were of course in the 1950s only the most primitive of genetic methods available for mammals that all look the same in their coat colour, and the idea that changes in animal behaviour involving territoriality might cause genetic shifts on a short-term period gradually lost favour. Few now think that Chitty was right in being evo-eco, but in some sense he was ahead of his time in thinking that natural selection might operate quickly in field populations. Given the many physiological and behavioural changes that can occur phenotypically in mammals, most subsequent work on grassland rodents has become buried in mechanisms that do not change because of genetic selection.

When we try to sort out whether to be concerned about evo-eco, we must strike a compromise between what the exact question is that we are trying to investigate, and how we can best construct a decision tree that can operate in real time with results that are useful for the research question. Not every ecological problem can be solved by sequencing the study organism.

Chitty, D. 1960. Population processes in the vole and their relevance to general theory. Canadian Journal of Zoology 38:99-113.

On Important Questions in Ecology

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There is a most interesting paper that you should read about the important questions in ecology:

Sutherland, W.J. et al. (2013) Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions. Journal of Ecology, 101, 58-67.

This paper represents the views of 388 ecologists who culled through all of the 754 questions submitted and vetted in a two day workshop in London in April 2012. There are many thesis topics highlighted in this list and it gives a good overview of what many ecologists think is important. But there are some problems with this approach that you might wish to consider after you read this paper.

We can begin with a relatively trivial point. The title indicates that it will discuss ‘fundamental’ questions in ecology but the Summary changes this to ‘important’ questions. To be sure the authors recognize that what we now think is ‘important’ may be judged in the future to be less than important, so in a sense they recognize this problem. ‘Important’ is not an operational word in science, and consequently it is always a focus for endless argument. But let us not get involved with semantics and look at the actual 100 questions.

As I read the paper I was reminded of the discussion in Peters (1991, p. 13) who had the audacity to point out that academic ecologists thrived on unanswerable questions. In particular Peters (1991) focused on ‘why’ questions as being high on the list of unanswerable ones, and it is good to see that there are only 2 questions out of 100 that have a ‘why’ in them. Most of the questions posed are ‘how’ questions (about 65 instances) and ‘what’ questions (about 52 instances).

In framing questions in any science there is a fine line in the continuum of very broad questions that define an agenda and at the other extreme to very specific questions about one species or community. With very broad questions there will never be a clear point at which we can say that we have answered that question so we can move on. With very specific questions we can answer them experimentally and move on. So where do we cut the cake of questions? Most of these 100 questions are very broad and so they both illuminate and frustrate me because they cannot be answered without making them more specific.

Let me go over just one example. Question 11 What are the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that govern species’ range margins? First, we might note that this question goes back at least 138 years to Alfred Wallace (1876, The Geographical Distribution of Animals), and has been repeated in many ecology textbooks ever since. There are few organisms for which it has been answered and very much speculation about it. At the moment the ecological mechanism in favour is ‘climate’. This is a question that can be answered ecologically only for particular species, and cannot be answered in real (human) time for the evolutionary mechanisms. Consequently it is an area rife for correlational ecology whose conclusions could possibly be tested in a hundred years if not longer. All of these problems should not stand in the way of doing studies on range margins, and there are many hundreds of papers that attest to this conclusion. My question is when will we know that we have answered this question, and my answer is never. We can in some cases use paleoecology to get at these issues, and then extrapolate that the future will be like the past, a most dubious assumption. My concern is that if we have not answered this question in 138 years, what is the hope that we will answer it now?

It is good to be optimistic about the future development of ecological science. Perhaps I have picked a poor example from the list of 100 questions, and my concern is that in this case at least this is not a question that I would suggest to a new PhD student. Still I am glad to have this list set out so clearly and perhaps the next step would be to write a synthesis paper on each of the 100 topics and discuss how much progress has been made on that particular issue, and what exactly we might do to answer the question more rapidly. How can we avoid in ecology what Cox (2007) called a “yawning abyss of vacuous generalities”?

Cox, D. R. (2007) Applied statistics: A review. Annals of Applied Statistics, 1, 1-16.

Peters, R. H. (1991) A Critique for Ecology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.

Sutherland, W. J., Freckleton, R. P., Godfray, H. C. J., Beissinger, S. R., Benton, T., Cameron, D. D., Carmel, Y., Coomes, D. A., Coulson, T., Emmerson, M. C., Hails, R. S., Hays, G. C., Hodgson, D. J., Hutchings, M. J., Johnson, D., Jones, J. P. G., Keeling, M. J., Kokko, H., Kunin, W. E. & Lambin, X. (2013) Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions. Journal of Ecology, 101, 58-67.

Open Letter from a Scientist to a Bureaucrat

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Let us assume for the moment that I am a scientist who has worked in a government research organization for 25 years under a series of bureaucrats. I have just retired and the object of this letter is to tell a bureaucrat what is good and what is bad about the bureaucratic government system. If you work in a perfect government system, perhaps you do not need to read further.

Dear Sir/Madam:

I would like to offer you some free advice that comes from a scientist who has worked in government for many years. This is presumptuous to be sure in light of our relative positions, but I feel you might benefit from some notes from the trenches.

First, science should never be organized in a top-down manner. We ecologists know about trophic cascades and the consequences it has for the lower trophic levels. You should not tell us what to do because you know nothing about the subject matter of the science, in this case ecology. I note especially that an MBA does not confer infinite wisdom on science matters. So I suggest you consider organizing things bottom-up. Your job is to provide scientists with the technical support, the funding, and the facilities to do their work. I note that this does not preclude you providing us with general areas of science in which we are expected to do our research. If our general position is to study the effectiveness of pollination in California crops, you should not tolerate us going to Africa to study elephant ecology. We appreciate that the government has at least some general ideas of what is critical to study. If they do not, it would be advisable to gather a group of scientists to discuss what the critical problems are in a particular area of science. Scientists do not work in closed rooms and do have a general understanding of what is happening in their field.

Second, do not muzzle us about anything scientific. We do not work for you or for the current government but we do work for the people of Canada or Australia or whatever country, and our mandate is to speak out on scientific questions, to provide evidence based policy guidance and to educate the public when errors are promulgated by people who know nothing about what they speak. This could well include government ministers who are known at least on occasion to utter complete nonsense. Our job is not to support the government’s policies of the day but to provide evidence about scientific questions. In general we scientists do not see government ministers crying out that they know more about brain surgery than trained doctors, so we think the same attitude ought to be taken toward ecologists.

Third, ask your scientists about the time frame of their scientific studies. Most bureaucrats seem to think that, since the world was created in 7 days, scientific work ought to take no more than a year or two or perhaps three. We would like to tell you that many, perhaps most, important ecological questions involve a time frame of 10 years or more, and some require continuous funding and support for periods in excess of 50 years. You apparently did not ask medical scientists to stop working on cancer or malaria after 3 years or even 50 years, so we are uncertain why ecologists should be kept to short time frames for their research. Ecological research is perhaps the most difficult of all the sciences, so if we do not find answers in a few years it is not because we are not working hard enough.

Finally, ask your scientists to publish in national and international journals because that is the corner stone for judging scientific progress. We do not mind having rules about rates of publication. And as a spur please fund your scientists to go to scientific meetings to present their results to the scientific world. And have them communicate to the public what they are doing and what they have found. After all the public pays, so why should they not hear about what has come of their tax dollars.

Your job, in a nutshell, is to support your scientists not to hinder them, to encourage their work, and to speak to the higher levels of government about why funding science is important. And to (at least on occasion) protest about government policies that are not based on scientific evidence. If you are successful in all of this, the people of your country will be the better for it. On the other hand, you may be headed for early retirement if you follow my advice.

I wish you success.

Sincerely yours,

A.B.C. Jones PhD, DSc, FRS, FAA
Retired

Two Visions of Ecological Research

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Let us assume for the moment that the goal of scientific ecology is to understand the reasons for changes in the distribution and abundance of animals, plants, and microbes. If you do not think this is our main agenda, perhaps you should not read further.

The conventional, old paradigm to achieve this goal is to obtain a good description of the natural history of the organisms of interest in a population or community, define the food web they operate within, and then determine by observations or manipulations the parameters that limit its distribution and abundance. This can be difficult to achieve in rich food webs with many species, and in systems in which the species are not yet taxonomically described, and particularly in microbe communities. Consequently a prerequisite of this paradigm is to have good taxonomy and to be able to recognize species X versus species Y. A whole variety of techniques can be used for this taxonomy, including morphology (the traditional approach) and genetics. Using this approach ecologists over the past 90 years have made much progress in deriving some tentative explanations for the changes that occur in populations and communities. If there has been a problem with this approach, it is largely because of disagreements about what data are sufficient to test hypothesis X, and whether the results of manipulation Y are convincing. A great deal of the accumulated data obtained with this approach has been useful to fisheries management, wildlife management, pest control, and agricultural production.

The new metagenomics paradigm, to use one label, suggests that this old approach is not getting us anywhere fast enough for microbial communities, and we need to forget most of this nonsense and get into sequencing, particularly for microbial communities. New improvements in the speed of doing this work makes it feasible. The question I wish to address here is not the validity or the great improvements in genetic analysis, but rather whether or not this approach can replace the conventional old paradigm. I appreciate that if we grab a sample of mud, water, or the bugs in an insect trap and grind it all up, and run it through these amazing sequencing machines, we get a very great amount of data. We then might try to associate some of these kinds of data with particular ‘species’ and this may well work in groups for which the morphological species are well described. But what do we do about the undescribed sequences? We know that microbial diversity is much higher than what we can currently culture in the laboratory. We can make rules about what to call unknown unit A, unknown unit B, and so on. That is fine, but now what? We are in some sense back where Linnaeus was in 1753 in giving names to plants.

Now comes the difficult bit. Do we just take the metagenomics approach and tack it on to the conventional approach, using unknown A, unknown B, etc. instead of Pseudomonas flavescens or Bacillus licheniformis? We cannot get very far this way because the first thing we need to decide is does unknown A a primary producer or unknown B a decomposer of complex organic molecules? So perhaps this leads us to invent a whole new taxonomy to replace the old one. But perhaps we will go another way to say we will answer questions with the new system like is this pond ecosystem changing in response to global warming or nutrient additions? We can describe many system shifts in DNA-terminology but will we have any knowledge of what they mean or how management might change these trends? We could work all this out in the long term I presume. So I guess my confusion is largely exactly which set of hypotheses are you going to test with the new metagenomics paradigm? I can see a great deal of alpha-descriptive information being captured but I am not sure where to go from there. My challenge to the developers of the new paradigm is to list a set of problems in the Earth’s ecosystems for which this new paradigm could provide better answers more quickly than the old approach.

Microbial ecology is certainly much more difficult to carry out than traditional ecology on macroscopic animals and plants. As such it should be able to use new technology that can improve understanding of the structure and function of microbe communities. All new advances in technology are helpful for solving some ecological problems and should be so used. The suggestion that the conventional approach is out of date should certainly be entertained but in the last 70 years the development of air photos, of radio telemetry, of satellite imagery, of electrophoresis, of simplified chemical analyses, of automated weather stations, and the new possibilities of genetic analysis have been most valuable to solving ecological questions for many of our larger species. But in every case, at every step we should be more careful to ask exactly what questions the new technology can answer. Piling up terabytes of data is not science and could in fact hinder science. We do not wish to validate the Rutherford prediction that our ecological science is “stamp collecting”.

On House Mouse Outbreaks in Australia

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It occurred to me after some recent discussions that the problem of house mouse outbreaks in Australia is almost a paradigm for modern ecological science. A brief synopsis. At irregular intervals house mice (an introduced pest) reach high densities in the wheat growing areas of eastern and southern Australia, and cause serious damage to wheat, barley, oats, and sunflower crops. There are two approaches to this applied problem.

The ecological approach is to understand why these outbreaks occur and why for many years (2-9 years) between outbreaks, hardly a mouse can be found. This approach has been highly successful led by a series of excellent Australian ecologists over the last 40 years. The key limitation is food, combined with social interactions, and the food supply is driven by rain at critical times of the year to provide seeds for the mice. There are no competitors for house mice, and there are a few insignificant predators, overwhelmed by the mouse’s high reproductive rate. These ecological facts are clearly known, and the job now is to build the best predictive models to help the farmers anticipate when the outbreak is coming. There are still important ecological questions to be studied, to be sure, but the broad outline of the ecological play is well described.

The management approach is much simpler because farmers can control house mice with poison, primarily zinc phosphide, and for them the question is when to poison, and secondarily (over time and with more research) can we develop better poisons so there are few non-target problems. Poisoning costs time and money so good farmers wish to minimize these costs.

The long-term issues get lost in this situation, a model of the way the world operates now with ecological and environmental problems. Questions about sustainability multiply in any system dependent on poisons for a solution. Will the target organisms become resistant so the poison does not work? Many examples exist of this already. Are there any long-term problems with soil organisms, or non-target species? No research yet on these issues, and perhaps they are more serious with herbicide applications in agriculture. And while predators do not control house mice during outbreaks, they do eat many of them and this food pulse may have implications for the wider ecosystem. We focus on farming and forget the wider ecosystem which has no dollars attached to it.

Ecologists recognize that these issues are not the farmers’ fault, but we raise the question of who worries about the long-term future of this system, and the answers to these long-term questions. The government is rushing to get out of long-term ecological and agricultural research and we leave problems that do not have immediacy.

Consequently we become short-sighted as a society. Long-term research becomes 1-3 years and not the 50-100 years that ecologists would support. And consequently applied ecologists bounce from one problem to the next under the paradigm that, no matter what we do, science will come up with a technological fix. There should be a better way. To go back to our house mice, we might ask (for example) if we implement no-till agriculture, what will be the consequences for house mouse survival and future outbreaks? The practical minister of agriculture will respond that we have no time or money for such research, so we lurch along, managing the world in an ad-hoc manner. There should be a better way. But meanwhile we must follow the money.

Should All Ecologists Become Social Scientists or Politicians?

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Two items this week have stirred me to write about the state of ecology. The first was a talk by an eminent biologist, who must remain nameless, about how scientists should operate. All very good, we should be evidence-based, open to falsification of hypotheses, and we should work as best we can to counter media misinformation. He/she talked about the future of biology in optimistic terms and in the entire one hour talk the word ‘biodiversity’ occurred once and the word ‘environment’ once. So my conclusion was that to this eminent biologist ecology was not on the radar as anything very important. We should be principally concerned about improving the health and wealth of humanity, and increasing economic growth.

This got me to thinking about why ecology falls at the bottom of the totem pole of science so that even though we work hard to understand the functioning of nature, ecologists seem to have value only to ourselves rather than to society. Perhaps society as a whole appreciates us for light entertainment about birds and bees, but when ecologists investigate problems and offer solutions they seem to be sidelined rapidly. Perhaps this is because taking care of the biosphere will cost money, and while we happily spend money on cars and new airplanes and guns, we can afford little for the natural world. One possible explanation for this is that many people and most politicians believe that “Mother Nature will take care of herself” at no financial cost.

If this is even partly correct, we need to change society’s view. There are several ways to do this, perhaps most importantly via education, but a more direct way is for ecologists to become social scientists and perhaps politicians. My experience with this recommendation is not terribly good. Social scientists have in my experience accomplished little for all their work on the human foibles of our time. Perhaps going into politics would be useful for our science if anyone wishes to cross that Rubicon, but there are few role models that we can put up.

So we continue in a political world where few ecologists sit in high places to challenge the modern paradigm of economic growth fuelled by non-renewable resources, and many of our national leaders see no human footprint on climatic warming. Short-term thinking is one element of this puzzle for we ecologists who take a longer view of life on Earth, but it must really rankle our paleo-ecologists who take a very long term look at changes in the Earth’s environment.

The second item this week that has encapsulated all of this was the announcement from a developed country that a new institute with over 1000 scientists was to be set up to study molecular biology for the improvement of human health. Now this is a noble cause that I do not wish to cast aspersions on, but it occurred to me that this was possibly a number greater than the total number of ecologists working in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The numbers are hard to document, but I have not seen anything like this kind of announcement for a new institute that would address any of our many ecological problems. There is money for many things but very little for ecology.

None of this is terribly new but I am puzzled why this is the case. We live in a world of inequality in which the rich squander the wealth of the Earth while the future of the planet seems of little concern. Luckily ecologists are a happy lot once they get a job because they can work in the laboratory or in the field on interesting problems and issues (if they can get the money). And to quote the latest Nature (March 13, 2014, p. 140) “If ecologists want to produce work useful to conservation, they might do better to spend their days sitting quietly in ecosystems with waterproof notebooks and hand lenses, writing everything down.” That will cost little money fortunately.

On the Need for Ecological Meetings

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Perhaps I am the only ecologist in the world who is overwhelmed by the number of conferences that go on every year. I think we need to consider why we have so many meetings and consider some of the problems of the current model for ecological scientific communication. The problems that bring this to the fore for me are five:

  • Travel in its many forms increases greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change. Ecologists in particular are not supposed to be happy about that.
  • The number and frequency of meetings operate on a time scale completely inconsistent with having any new experimental data to report.
  • Large meetings operate with 6 or more concurrent sessions that cannot all be attended and there are so many people you cannot possibly talk to many you wish to meet.
  • Many of the talks at some meetings are poorly presented and a complete waste of one’s time.
  • Modern forms of electronic communication produce much more rapid and efficient transfer of scientific information than attending conferences.

I have of course left out the somewhat frivolous but true observation that really important people at meetings never go to any of the talks except their own.

The advantages of scientific meetings are many, and I am a believer in communication in person rather than via electronic media. So we must be careful here – I do not propose getting rid of all meetings. And I recognize that they are very important for young ecologists to help their careers develop.

So I think we have a problem and we need to think of possible solutions. One solution is to space meetings every 4 years instead of annually. Many societies do this already and do not seem to suffer. Even if we had an ESA meeting every second year we would have less stress. Another solution has been to divide up meetings into smaller groups, so the small mammal population ecologists meet as a unit, and the stream ecologists meet separately, and the carbon cycle ecologists meet on their own. This works to cut the size of meetings down and again they do not always need to hold meetings annually. Further reductions can occur by regional meetings, so the East Coast stream ecologists get together readily with minimal travel and so on. Much of this is already happening.

We have not yet used electronic forms of communication very effectively. Plenary lectures could be streamed on video and thus be available around the world for little cost and less CO2 emissions. I am hardly the one to tell you about modern communication but even I use Skype and other platforms to keep in touch with colleagues and ask questions.

There is a slightly frantic nature about ecological meeting e mails that reminds me of the Church in the good old days when every Saturday or Sunday you were supposed to attend for some reason never quite clear. If we are to continue to have large meetings often, we might at least have them in less developed countries that could use the economic stimulus that is clearly a large part of large scientific meetings. Which raises the issue of how much money should we spend on going to meetings versus doing some scientific work.

And my final complaint, having just witnessed the G20 Meeting in Australia, is that we should not adopt their model of meeting every year in very expensive places like Sydney and not having accomplished a single thing in recent memory except to say that they are a very important group.

On Understanding the Boreal Forest Ecosystem

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I have spent the last 40 years studying the Yukon boreal forest. When I tell this to my associates I get two quite different reactions. First, on the positive side they are impressed with the continuity of effort and the fact that we have learned a great deal about the interactions of species in the Canadian boreal forest (Krebs, Boutin, and Boonstra 2001). Alternatively, on the negative side, I am told I am at fault for doing something of no practical management importance for so long when there are critical conservation problems in our Canadian backyard. Clearly I prefer the positive view, but everyone can decide these issues for themself. What I would like to do here is to lay out what I think are the critical issues in the Canadian boreal forest that have not been addressed so far. I do this in the hope that someone will pick up the torch and look into some of them.

The first issue is that ecological studies of the boreal ecosystem are completely fractionated. The most obvious division is that we have studied the boreal forest in the southwest Yukon with few concurrent studies of the alpine tundra that rises above the forest in every range of mountains. The ecotone between the forest and the tundra is not a strict boundary for many plant species or for many of the vertebrate species we have studied. On a broader scale, there are few studies of aquatic ecosystems within the boreal zone, either in lakes or streams, another disconnect. The wildlife management authorities are concerned with the large vertebrates – moose, bears, caribou, mountain sheep – and this work tends not to tie in with other work on the smaller species in the food web. Interests in the carbon dynamics of the boreal zone have greatly increased but these studies in Canada are also completely disconnected from all other ecological studies that consider population and community dynamics. I think it is fair to say that carbon dynamics in the boreal forest could turn out to be a very local affair, and too much generalization has already been made with too little spatial and temporal data.

One could consider the ecology of the boreal zone like a puzzle, with bits of the puzzle being put together well by researches in one particular area, but with no view of the major dimensions of the total puzzle. This is readily understood when much of the research is done as part of graduate thesis work that has a limit of 4-5 years before researchers move on to another position. It is also a reflection of the low funding that ecology receives.

Within the Yukon boreal forest there are several areas of research that we have not been able to address in the time I and my many colleagues have worked there. Mushroom crops come and go in apparent response to rainfall (Krebs et al. 2008) but we do not know the species of above ground mushrooms and consequently do not know if their fluctuations are uniform or if some species have specialized requirements. Since fungi are probably the main decomposers in this ecosystem, knowing which species will do what as climate changes could be important. On a practical level, foresters are determined to begin logging more and more in the boreal zone but we have no clear understanding of tree regeneration or indeed any good studies of forest succession after fire or logging. Since logging in northern climates is more of a mining operation than a sustainable exercise, such information might be useful before we proceed too far. If the turnaround for a logged forest is of the order of 300 years, any kind of logging is unsustainable in the human time frame.

The list goes on. Snowshoe hare cycles vary greatly in amplitude and we suspect that this is due to predator abundance at the start of any 10 year cycle (Krebs et al. 2013).  The means to test this idea are readily available – satellite telemetry – but it would require a lot of money because these collars are expensive and need to be deployed on lynx, coyotes, and great-horned owls at least. And it needs to be done on a landscape scale with cooperating groups in Alaska, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and British Columbia at least. Large-scale ecology to be sure, but the results would be amazing. Radio-telemetry has the ability to interest the public, and each school in the region could have their tagged animals to follow every week. Physicists manage to convince the public that they need lots of money to do large experiments, but ecologists with down to earth questions are loath to ask for a lot of money to find out how the world works on a large scale.

Migratory songbirds have been largely ignored in the boreal forest, partly because they leave Canada after the summer breeding period but at least some of these songbirds appear to be declining in numbers with no clear reason. Yet studies on them are virtually absent, and we monitor numbers in imprecise ways, and continue to mark the position of the deck chairs on the Titanic with no understanding of why it is sinking.

Insect populations in the boreal forest are rarely studied unless they are causing immediate damage to trees, and consequently we have little information on their roles in ecosystem changes.

At the end of this list we can say in the best manner of the investigative reporter why did you not do these things already? The answer to that is also informative. It is because almost all this completed research has been done by university professors and their graduate students and postdocs. What has been done by all my colleagues is amazing because they are not in charge of the boreal forest. The people are, via their governments, provincial and federal. The main job of all of us when this research in the Yukon boreal forest was being done has been education –to teach and do research that will train students in the best methods available. So if you wish to be an investigative reporter, it is best to ask why governments across the board have not funded the federal and provincial research groups that had as their mandate to understand how this ecosystem operates. Because all these questions are about long-term changes, the research group must be stable in funding and person-power in the long term. There is nothing I have seen in my lifetime that comes close to this in government for environmental work except for weather stations. In the short term our governments work to the minute with re-election in sight, and long term vision is suppressed. The environment is seen as a source of dollars and as a convenient garbage can and science only gets in the way of exploitation. And in the end Mother Nature will take care of herself, so they hope. Perhaps we need a few Bill Gates’ types to get interested in funding long-term research.

But there remain for ecologists many interesting questions that are at present not answered, and will help us complete the picture of how this large ecosystem operates.

Krebs, C.J., S. Boutin, and R. Boonstra, editors. 2001. Ecosystem Dynamics of the Boreal Forest: the Kluane Project. Oxford University Press, New York.

Krebs, C.J., P. Carrier, S. Boutin, R. Boonstra, and E.J. Hofer. 2008. Mushroom crops in relation to weather in the southwestern Yukon. Botany 86:1497-1502.

Krebs, C.J., K. Kielland, J. Bryant, M. O’Donoghue, F. Doyle, C. McIntyre, D. DiFolco, N. Berg, S. Carrier, R. Boonstra, S. Boutin, A.J. Kenney, D.G. Reid, K. Bodony, J. Putera, and T. Burke. 2013. Synchrony in the snowshoe hare cycle in northwestern North America, 1970-2012. Canadian Journal of Zoology 91:562-572.