Category Archives: Biology Education

Whither Demography in an Era of Biodiversity Science?

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Biodiversity science has overtaken traditional ecological science in an important way that bears some discussion. Biodiversity science seeks as its main goal to protect species from declining to extinction. It overlaps traditional population and community ecology partly by concentrating on iconic species that are declining in abundance and thus trying to prevent species loss, but the major focus of biodiversity science is on the species composition of communities and ecosystems and trying to understand what factors are driving deleterious changes. This task is difficult to complete currently because of a shortage of research time, person-power and money, so we are driven to select relatively few ecosystems to concentrate our conservation efforts upon. If we cannot do everything for all species, we must choose what to do at the present time, and this releases a cascade of discussions and arguments about what species are ‘flagship’, “umbrella”, or “keystone” in any particular community or ecosystem (Barua 2011).

Now we can go in two directions. We can take the simplest route and say that all species are of equal importance, so the objective of biodiversity science becomes ‘occupancy” – is species X still existing in ecosystem Y? Occupancy can be established in a variety of ways from simple visual sightings, traps, cameras, e-DNA, to electronic sound recording devices. Occupancy for species in a particular ecosystem is a useful parameter for biodiversity studies but it is alpha-level ecology for understanding community or ecosystem dynamics. Determining occupancy every month, year, or decade will provide a start in community and ecosystem understanding but in order to achieve its goal as a science it needs population and community ecology to measure and understand the dynamics underlying occupancy, and this is the more complicated route that we can take. The defining science for this second level of understanding comes from dynamics, both population and community dynamics.

Population dynamics is necessary for determining if a particular species is declining in numbers or biomass, and what the causes are of the observed trends. We are led into demography, the measurement of births, deaths, and movements in animals and the equivalent parameters in plants. But now we run into the most serious problem of determining what parameters are the causal agents of declines in abundance and what procedures will alleviate species declines. If we have many species in our community or ecosystem, the requirements for research are extravagant, given the current workers and dollars currently available for environmental science. All ecologists want to protect biodiversity but how might we best achieve that goal?

We fall back at this point into simple general procedures for biodiversity conservation like designation of national parks or protected areas with the hope that the biodiversity of the designated area will not decline. We do not have the person-power to have frequent occupancy surveys for any national park, much less to have the investigations of why an iconic species is declining in an area. At present we must fall back on ‘umbrella species’ or ‘flagship species’ (Simberloff 1998). There is an extensive literature on this approach to biodiversity conservation and recent reviews, some critical (Tälle et al. 2023), others somewhat more positive (Sumbh and Hof 2022, Clark-Wolf et al. 2024), combining this approach with food web structure (Wang and Zhou 2023).   

Complicating the whole issue of protecting biodiversity is the issue of cryptic species, undescribed species, and rare species that are capable of taxonomic and ecological resolution but only at a large cost and a long timeframe to achieve results (Cheng et al. 2024). Once we are successful in protecting our communities and ecosystems, we immediately face the demographic issue of what affects the abundance of all the species of interest, and then the social and political issue of the funds available for conservation of these species. We need to bring the approaches of biodiversity science and classical demographic ecology together to achieve conservation goals. We can do this only by recognizing that knowing occupancy is not enough to achieve conservation success, and we need to follow up with population and community ecology within the context of food webs so that we can understand trends in abundance and finally propose possible actions for conservation management. We have much to do.

Barua, M. (2011) Mobilizing metaphors: the popular use of keystone, flagship and umbrella species concepts. Biodiversity and Conservation, 20, 1427-1440.doi:10.1007/s10531-011-0035-y.

Cheng, R., Luo, A., Orr, M., Ge, D., Houu, Z.e., Qu, Y., Guo, B., Zhang, F., Sha, Z., Zhao, Z., Wang, M., Shi, X., Han, H., Zhou, Q., Li, Y., Liu, X., Shao, C., Zhang, A., Zhou, X. & Zhu, C. (2024) Cryptic diversity begets challenges and opportunities in biodiversity research. Integrative Zoology, (in press). doi: 10.1111/1749-4877.12809.

Clark-Wolf, T.J., Holt, K.A., Johansson, E., Nisi, A.C., Rafiq, K., West, L., Boersma, P.D., Hazen, E.L., Moore, S.E. & Abrahms, B. (2024) The capacity of sentinel species to detect changes in environmental conditions and ecosystem structure. Journal of Applied Ecology, (in press). doi: 10.1111/1365-2664.14669.

Simberloff, D. (1998) Flagships, umbrellas, and keystones: is single-species management passe in the landscape era? Biological Conservation, 83, 247-257.doi: 10.1016/S0006-3207(97)00081-5.

Sumbh, O. & Hof, A.R. (2022) Can pikas hold the umbrella? Understanding the current and future umbrella potential of keystone species Pika (Ochotona spp.). Global Ecology and Conservation, 38, e02247.doi: 10.1016/j.gecco.2022.e02247.

Tälle, M., Ranius, T. & Öckinger, E. (2023) The usefulness of surrogates in biodiversity conservation: A synthesis. Biological Conservation, 288; e110384. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2023.110384.

Wang, Q., Li, X.C. & Zhou, X.H. (2023) New shortcut for conservation: The combination management strategy of “keystone species” plus “umbrella species” based on food web structure. Biological Conservation, 286, 110265.doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2023.110265.

How Much Can Ecologists Lie?

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An ethical dilemma arises in ecology for scientists who have strong beliefs about climate change and the protection of biodiversity. Should you tell lies in your scientific papers or to the media regarding ecological issues? In essence the simple answer is never. Science is the search for the truth and the truth should be obtained from empirical evidence. This does not mean that a scientist cannot have any opinions about which you can shout very loudly, if for example you think that poached eggs are better than scrambled eggs. But there should be a general taboo about lying and we should keep a sharp distinction that opinions ≠ evidence.

But in the real world these distinctions are not always clear. How much should you as a scientist bend or gloss over the evidence? If you find that a particular pollutant will have a 75% chance of killing fish in a river system, should you stand aside as an industry argues that there is a 25% chance that nothing will happen, and profits must come before caution. In these kinds of discussions environmentalists always lose because of the precautionary principle and information is never 100% precise. The temptation is to avoid losing by lying, stretching the evidence, or shouting.

In this era of the climate disaster, it is difficult to restrain from talking about what will happen in the future. While opinions fly back and forth on what is happening, whether it will all reverse, and how soon changes will occur, ecologists must remain trustworthy by countering misinterpretations of ecological trends without rancour. When our research is incomplete, we should say so and indicate what needs to be done next to fill in the gaps in knowledge. If we are wrong in our predictions, we should admit it and discuss why. We need to point out the problems and the potential consequences from what we know today. This is not as difficult as it sounds, and it requires only to draw a line between the existing evidence and likely extrapolations from current knowledge.

A major part of current misinformation on social media about scientific issues is that existing evidence is blown out of proportion in an attempt to get some kind of specific action by governments or corporations. Lies or disinformation are more interesting to the media than the details of what is actually reliable knowledge. Uncertain predictions about future changes by scientists are often translated in social media as certain predictions. Perhaps the most important but most difficult aspect of predictions is the need to go back one or more years and list the predictions that were made and evaluate how accurate they were. Model systems for the sciences are perhaps earthquake predictions and weather predictions. While we know a great deal about the geological causes of earthquakes and have mapped major faults along which they occur, so all would agree that we “understand earthquakes scientifically”, we are not able to predict exactly where and when the next major quake will occur. Similarly we are all familiar with weather predictions which are limited to short time intervals even though we have detailed knowledge of the physical laws that govern air mass movements.

Some samples of the very large literature on forecasting earthquakes (Fallou et al. 2022, Wikelski et al. 2020), and on biotic extinctions (Cowie et al. 2022, Kehoe et al. 2021, Lambdon and Cronk 2020, Nikolaou and Katsanevakis 2023, Williams et al. 2021) provide an introduction to finding out how scientists deal with the uncertainties of prediction in these two example areas of science. Knowledge is power but it is not infinite power, and all scientists should qualify their predictions or projections as possibly in error. Lying about complex questions is not part of science.  

Cowie, R.H., Bouchet, P. & Fontaine, B. (2022) The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation? Biological Reviews, 97, 640-663.doi: 10.1111/brv.128161.

Fallou, L., Corradini, M. & Cheny, J.M. (2022) Preventing and debunking earthquake misinformation: Insights into EMSC’s practices. Frontiers in Communication, 7, 993510.doi. 10.3389/fcomm.2022.993510

Kehoe, R., Frago, E. & Sanders, D. (2021) Cascading extinctions as a hidden driver of insect decline. Ecological Entomology, 46, 743-756.doi: 10.1111/een.129851.

Lambdon, P. & Cronk, Q. (2020) Extinction dynamics under extreme conservation threat: The Flora of St Helena. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 8, 41.doi: 10.3389/fevo.2020.00041.

Nikolaou, A. & Katsanevakis, S. (2023) Marine extinctions and their drivers. Regional Environmental Change, 23, 88.doi: 10.1007/s10113-023-02081-8.

Wikelski, M., Mueller, U., Scocco, P., Catorci, A., Desinov, L.V., Belyaev, M.Y., Keim, D., Pohlmeier, W., Fechteler, G. & Martin Mai, P. (2020) Potential short-term earthquake forecasting by farm animal monitoring. Ethology, 126, 931-941.doi: 10.1111/eth.13078.

Williams, N.F., McRae, L. & Clements, C.F. (2021) Scaling the extinction vortex: Body size as a predictor of population dynamics close to extinction events. Ecology and Evolution, 11, 7069-7079.doi: 10.1002/ece3.7555.

Should Ecology Abandon Popper?

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The first question I must ask is whether you the reader have ever heard of Karl Popper. If the answer is no, then you could profit from reading Popper (1963) before you read this. An abbreviated version of the Popperian approach to science is presented in a short paper by Platt (1963) The simplest version of Popper and Platt is that we should have a hypothesis with specific predictions and one or more alternative hypotheses with other predictions, and science advances by finding out which hypotheses could be rejected with empirical evidence. The focus of this blog is on a recent paper by Raerinne (2024) claiming that Popperian ecology is a delusion. This is a claim well worth discussing particularly since most of the sciences progress using a Popperian approach to testing hypotheses.

To begin perhaps we should recognize two kinds of papers that appear in ecological journals. A very large set of ecological papers appear to be largely or entirely descriptive natural history typically of past or present events with no hypotheses in mind. Many of these papers end with a conclusion that could be designated as a hypothesis but with little discussion of alternatives. These papers can be very valuable in giving us the state of populations, communities, or ecosystems with recommendations for changes that should be made to alleviate developing problems. A good example are papers describing forest and grassland fires of recent years which can end with some management recommendations, and perhaps with alternative recommendations. These recommendations usually arise from experience and judgements, and they may or not be valid. The Popperian approach would be to set up hypotheses and test them empirically, but if we are people of action, we press onward with a preferred management action. The non-Popperian approach would be very efficient if we were correct in our diagnosis, and in many cases this approach works well. The basis of the issue here is what is evidence in ecology and how should it be sharpened into recommendations for conservation and management.  

The Popperian approach to ecological science is to recognize problems that require a solution to increase our knowledge base, and to suggest a series of alternative set of mechanisms that could solve or alleviate the problem. Ecological papers supporting this approach can often be recognized by searching for the word “hypothesis” in the text. A simple example of this Popperian approach could be finding the causes of the continuing decline of a commercial fishery. The decline might be due to predation on the target fish or invertebrate, a disease, added pollution to the water body, climate change increasing the water temperature and thus metabolic functions, introduced species of competitors for food or space. One or more of these causal factors could be involved and the job of the ecologist is to find out which one or several are diagnostic. Given the complexity of ecological problems, it is typically not possible to test these alternative hypotheses in one grand experiment, and the typical approach will involve adaptive management or evidence-based conservation (Gillson et al. 2019, Serrouya et al., Westgate et al. 2013). Complexity however should not be used as an excuse to do poor science.

What is the alternative if we abandon Popper? We could adopt the inductive approach and gather data that we put together with our judgement to declare that we have a correct answer to our questions, “seat of the pants” ecology. But this approach is heavily dependent on the idea that “the future will be like the past”. This approach to ecological problems will be most useful for the very short term. The simplest example comes from weather forecasting in which the prognosis for today’s weather is what it was like yesterday with minor adjustments. We could observe trends with this approach but then we must have a statistical model that predicts, for example, that the trend is linear or exponential. But the history of science is that we can do much better by understanding the mechanisms underlying the changes we see. A good overview of the dilemmas of this inductive approach for conservation biology is provided by Caughley (1994). The operative question here is whether the inductive approach achieves problem resolutions more efficiently than the Popperian approach through conjecture and refutation.

Raerinne (2023, 2024) does biology in general and ecology in particular a disservice in criticizing Popper’s approach to ecology by arguing that ecology should not be criticized nor evaluated from the Popperian perspective. I think this judgement is wrong, and Raerinne’s conclusion arises from a philosophical viewpoint which could well have little applicability to how ecologists solve empirical problems in the real world. But you can judge.  

Carducci, A., Federigi, I. & Verani, M. (2020) Airborne transmission and its prevention: Waiting for evidence or applying the Precautionary Principle? Atmosphere, 11 (7), 710.doi: 10.3390/atmos11070710.

Caughley, G. (1994) Directions in conservation biology. Journal of Animal Ecology, 63, 215-244. doi: 10.2307/5542.

Gillson, L., Biggs, H. & Rogers, K. (2019) Finding common ground between adaptive management and evidence-based approaches to biodiversity conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 34, 31-44.doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2018.10.003.

Platt, J.R. (1964) Strong inference. Science, 146, 347-353.doi: 10.1126/science.146.3642.347.

Popper, K.R. (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Raerinne, J. (2023) Myths of past biases and progress in biology. Theory in Biosciences, 142, 383-399.doi: 10.1007/s12064-023-00403-2.

Raerinne, J. (2024) Popperian ecology is a delusion. Ecology and Evolution, 14, e11106.doi: 10.1002/ece3.11106.

Serrouya, R., Seip, D.R., Hervieux, D., McLellan, B.N., McNay, R.S., Steenweg, R., Heard, D.C., Hebblewhite, M., Gillingham, M. & Boutin, S. (2019) Saving endangered species using adaptive management. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116, 6181-6186.doi: 10.1073/pnas.1816923116 .

Westgate, M.J., Likens, G.E. & Lindenmayer, D.B. (2013) Adaptive management of biological systems: A review. Biological Conservation, 158, 128-139.doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2012.08.016 .

Do We Need to Replicate Ecological Experiments?

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If you read papers on the philosophy of science you will very quickly come across the concept of replication, the requirement to test the same hypothesis twice or more before you become too attached to your conclusions. As a new student or a research scientist you face this problem when you wish to replicate some previous study. If you do replicate, you risk being classed as an inferior scientist with no ideas of your own. If you refuse to replicate and try something new, you will be criticized as reckless and not building a solid foundation in your science.  

There is an excellent literature discussing the problem of replication in ecology in particular and science in general. Nichols et al. (2019) argue persuasively that a single experiment is not enough. Amrheim et al. (2019) approach the problem from a statistical point of view and caution that single statistical tests are a shaky platform for drawing solid conclusions. They point out that statistical tests not only test hypotheses, but also countless assumptions and particularly for ecological studies the exact plant and animal community in which the study takes place. In contrast to ecological science, medicine probably has more replication problems at the other extreme – too many replications – leading to a waste of research money and talent. (Siontis and Ioannidis 2018).

A graduate seminar could profitably focus on a list of the most critical experiments or generalizations of our time in any subdiscipline of ecology. Given such a list we could ask if the conclusions still stand as time has passed, or perhaps if climate change has upset the older predictions, or whether the observations or experiments have been replicated to test the strength of conclusions. We can develop a stronger science of ecology only if we recognize both the strengths and the limitations of our current ideas.

Baker (2016) approached this issue by asking the simple question “Is there a reproducibility crisis?” Her results are well worth visiting. She had to cast a wide net in the sciences so unfortunately there are no details specific to ecological science in this paper. A similar question in ecology would have to distinguish observational studies and experimental manipulations to narrow down a current view of this issue. An interesting example is explored in Parker (2013) who analyzed a particular hypothesis in evolutionary biology about plumage colour in a single bird species, and the array of problems of an extensive literature on sexual selection in this field is astonishing.

A critic might argue that ecology is largely a descriptive science that should not expect to develop observational or experimental conclusions that will extend very much beyond the present. If that is the case, one might argue that replication over time is important for deciding when an established principle is no longer valid. Ecological predictions based on current knowledge may have much less reliability than we would hope, but the only way to find out is to replicate. Scientific progress depends on identifying goals and determining how far we have progressed to achieving these goals (Currie 2019). To advance we need to discuss replication in ecology.

Amrhein, V., Trafinnow, D. & Greenland, S. (2019) Inferential statistics as descriptive statistics: There is no replication crisis if we don’t expect replication. American Statistician, 73, 262-270. doi: 10.1080/00031305.2018.1543137.

Baker, M. (2016) Is there a reproducibility crisis in science? Nature, 533, 452-454.

Currie, D.J. (2019) Where Newton might have taken ecology. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 28, 18-27. doi: 10.1111/geb.12842.

Nichols, J.D., Kendall, W.L. & Boomer, G.S. (2019) Accumulating evidence in ecology: Once is not enough. Ecology and Evolution, 9, 13991-14004. doi: 10.1002/ece3.5836.

Parker, T.H. (2013) What do we really know about the signalling role of plumage colour in blue tits? A case study of impediments to progress in evolutionary biology. Biological Reviews, 88, 511-536. doi: 10.1111/brv.12013.

Siontis, K.C. & Ioannidis, J.P.A. (2018) Replication, duplication, and waste in a quarter million systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Circulation: Cardiovascular quality and outcomes, 11, e005212. doi: 10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.118.005212.

Back to Nature vs. Nurture

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The ancient argument of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ continues to arise in biology. The question has arisen very forcefully in a new book by James Tabery (Tabery 2023). The broad question he examines in this book is the conflict between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in western medicine. In a broad sense ‘nature’ is discussed as the modern push in medicine to find the genetic basis of some of the common human degenerative diseases – Parkinson’s, dementia, asthma, diabetes, cancer, hypertension – to mention only a few medical problems of our day. The ‘nature’ approach to medicine in this book is represented by molecular genetics and the Human Genome Project. The ‘nurture’ approach to treating these medical conditions is via studying health outcomes in people subject to environmental contamination, atmospheric pollution, water quality, chemicals in food preparations, asbestos in buildings, and other environmental issues including how children are raised and educated. The competition over these two approaches was won very early by the Human Genome Project, and many of the resources for medicine over the last 30 years were put into molecular biology which made spectacular progress in diving into the genome of affected people and then making great promises of personalized medicine. The environmental approach to these medical conditions received much less money and was not viewed as sufficiently scientific. The irony of all this in retrospect is that the ‘nature’ or DNA school had no hypotheses about the problems being investigated but relied on the assumption that if we got enough molecular genetic data on thousands of people that something would jump out at us, and we would locate for example the gene(s) causing Parkinson’s, and then we could alter these genes with gene therapy or specific pharmaceuticals. By contrast the ‘nurture’ school had many specific hypotheses to test about air pollution and children’s health, about lead in municipal water supply and brain damage, and a host of very specific insights about how some of these health problems could be alleviated by legislation and changes in diet for example.

So, the question then becomes where are we today? The answer Tabery (2023) gives is that the ‘nature’ or molecular genetic “personalized medicine” approach has largely failed in achieving its goals despite the large amount of money invested because there is no single or small set of genes that cause specific diseases, but many genes that have complex interactions. In contrast, the ‘nurture’ school has made progress in identifying conditions that help decrease the occurrence of some of our common diseases, realizing that the problems are often difficult because they require changes in human behaviour like stopping smoking or improving diets.

All this discussion would possibly produce the simple conclusion that both “nature” and “nurture” are both involved in these complex human conditions. So, what could this medical discussion tell us about the condition of modern ecological science? I think two things perhaps. First, it is a general error to use science without hypotheses. Yet this is too often what ecologists do – gather a large amount of data that can be measured without too much prolonged effort and then try to make sense of it by applying hypotheses after the fact. And second, technology in ecology can be a benefit or a curse. Take, for example, the advances in vertebrate ecology that have come from the ability to describe the movements of individual animals in space. To have a map of hundreds of locations of an individual animal provides good natural history but does not address any specific hypothesis. Contrast this approach with that of Studd et al. (2021) and Shiratsuru et al. (2023) who use movement data to test important questions about kill rates of predators on different species of prey.

Many large-scale ecological approaches suffer from the same problem as the ‘nature’ paradigm – use ‘big science’ to measure many variables and then try to answer some important question for example about how climate change is affecting communities of plants and animals. Nagy et al. (2021) and Li et al. (2022) provide excellent examples of this approach. Schimel and Keller (2015) discuss what is needed to bring hypothesis testing to ‘big science’. Lindenmayer et al. (2018) discuss how conventional, question-driven long-term monitoring and hypothesis testing need to be combined with ‘big science’ to better ecological understanding. Pau et al. (2022) give a warning of how ‘big science’ data from airborne imaging can fail to agree with ground-based field studies in one core NEON grassland site in central USA.

The conclusion to date is that there is little integration in ecology of the equivalent of “nature” and “nurture” in medicine if in ecology we match ‘big science’ with ‘nature’ and field studies on the ground with ‘nurture’. Without that integration we risk in future another negative review in ecology like that provided now by Tabery (2023) for medical approaches to human diseases.

Lindenmayer, D.B., Likens, G.E. & Franklin, J.F. (2018) Earth Observation Networks (EONs): Finding the Right Balance. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 33, 1-3.doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.10.008.

Li, D., et al. (2022) Standardized NEON organismal data for biodiversity research. Ecosphere, 13, e4141.doi:10.1002/ecs2.4141.

Nagy, R.C., et al. (2021) Harnessing the NEON data revolution to advance open environmental science with a diverse and data-capable community. Ecosphere, 12, e03833.doi: 10.1002/ecs2.3833.

Pau, S., et al. (2022) Poor relationships between NEON Airborne Observation Platform data and field-based vegetation traits at a mesic grassland. Ecology, 103, e03590.doi: 10.1002/ecy.3590.

Schimel, D. & Keller, M. (2015) Big questions, big science: Meeting the challenges of global ecology. Oecologia, 177, 925-934.doi: 10.1007/s00442-015-3236-3.

Shiratsuru, S., Studd, E.K., Majchrzak, Y.N., Peers, M.J.L., Menzies, A.K., Derbyshire, R., Jung, T.S., Krebs, C.J., Murray, D.L., Boonstra, R. & Boutin, S. (2023) When death comes: Prey activity is not always predictive of diel mortality patterns and the risk of predation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290, 20230661.doi.

Studd, E.K., Derbyshire, R.E., Menzies, A.K., Simms, J.F., Humphries, M.M., Murray, D.L. & Boutin, S. (2021) The Purr-fect Catch: Using accelerometers and audio recorders to document kill rates and hunting behaviour of a small prey specialist. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 12, 1277-1287.doi. 10.1111/2041-210X.13605

Tabery, J. (2023) Tyranny of the Gene: Personalized Medicine and the Threat to Public Health. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York. 336 pp. ISBN: 9780525658207.

Ecology for Now or the Future

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With the general belief that the climate is changing and that these changes must continue for at least 100 years due to the atmospheric physics of greenhouse gases, ecologists of all stripes face a difficult decision. The optimist says to continue with current studies, with due analysis of data from the past getting published, with the assumption that the future will be like the past. We know that the future will not be like the past so our belief in the future is a projection not a prediction. Does this mean that ecologists today should really be in the History Department of the Faculty of Arts?

Well, no one would allow this to happen, since we are scientists not the connivers of untestable stories of past events that masquerade as history, a caricature of the scientific method. The general problem is applicable to all the sciences. The physical sciences of physics and chemistry are fixed for all eternity, so physicists do not have to worry. The geological sciences are a mix of history and applied physics with hypotheses that are partly testable in the current time but with an overall view of future predictions that have a time scale of hundreds to thousands of years. One way to look at this problem is to imagine what a textbook of Physics would look like in 100 years, compared to a textbook of Geology or Biology or Ecology.

Ecological science is burdened by the assumption of equilibrium systems which we all know to be false since we have the long-term evidence of evolution staring at us as well as the short-term evidence of climate change. Ecologists have only two options under these constraints: assume equilibrium conditions over short time-frames or model the system to provide future projections of change. First, assume we are dealing with equilibrium systems within a defined time frame so that we can define clear hypotheses and test them on a short time scale of 10 to perhaps 20 years so we reach a 10–20-year time scale understanding of ecological processes. This is how most of our ecological work is currently carried out. If we wish to study the pollination of a particular set of plants or a crop, we work now to find out which species pollinate, and then hopefully in a short time frame try to monitor if these species are increasing or declining over our 10–20-year time span. But we do this research with the knowledge that the time frame of our ecological information is at most 100 years and mostly much less. So, we panic with bird declines over a 48 year time span (Rosenberg et al. 2019) with an analysis based on unreliable population data, and we fail to ask what the pattern might look like if we had data for the last 100 years or what it might look like in the next 100 years. We have the same problem with insect declines (Wagner et al. 2021, Warren et al. 2021).

If we wish to improve these studies we need much better monitoring programs, and with some notable exceptions there is little sign yet that this is happening (Lindenmayer et al. 2018, 2020). But the real question must come back to the time frame and how we can make future projections. We cannot do this with a 3-year funding cycle. If most of our conservation problems can be traced to human alterations of the biosphere then we must document these carefully with the usual scientific methods. At present I would hazard a guess that 95% of all endangered species are due directly to human meddling, even if we remove the effect of climate change.  

One way to make future projections is to model the population or community under study. A great deal of modelling is being done and has been done but there is little follow-through of how accurate the model predictions have been and little plan to test these projections. We may be successful with models that predict next year’s population or community dynamics, given much background data but that is only a tiny step to estimating what will be there in even 20 or 30 years. We need testable models more than panic calls about declining species with no efforts to discover if and why.

Where does that leave us? We must continue to analyse the ecological state of our current populations and communities and beware of the assumption that they are equilibrium systems. While physics for the future is rather well settled, ecological questions are not.

Lindenmayer, D.B., Likens, G.E., and Franklin, J.F. (2018). Earth Observation Networks (EONs): Finding the Right Balance. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, 1-3. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.10.008.

Lindenmayer, D.B., Kooyman, R.M., Taylor, C., Ward, M., and Watson, J.E.M. (2020). Recent Australian wildfires made worse by logging and associated forest management. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, 898-900. doi: 10.1038/s41559-020-1195-5.

Rosenberg, K.V., et al. (2019). Decline of the North American avifauna. Science 366, 120-124. doi: 10.1126/science.aaw1313.

Wagner, D.L., Grames, E.M., Forister, M.L., Berenbaum, M.R., and Stopak, D. (2021). Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, e2023989118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2023989118.

Warren, M.S., et al. (2021). The decline of butterflies in Europe: Problems, significance, and possible solutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (2), e2002551117. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2002551117.

On Biodiversity Science

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With David Attenborough and all the amazing picture books on biodiversity there can be few people in the world who have not been alerted to the array of beautiful and interesting species on Earth. Until recently the subject of biodiversity, known to First Nations since long, long ago, had not entered the western world of automobiles, industry, farming, fishing, music, theatres, and movies. Biodiversity is now greatly appreciated by most people, but perhaps more as entertainment for western societies and more for subsistence food in less wealthy parts of our world.

There are many different measures of ‘biodiversity’ and when discussing how we should protect biodiversity we should be careful about exactly how this word is being used. The number of different species in an area is one simple measure of biodiversity. But often the types of organisms being considered are less well defined. Forest ecologists attempt to protect forest biodiversity, but logging companies are more concerned only with trees and tree size for commercial use. Bird watchers are concerned with birds and have developed much citizen science in counting birds. Mushroom connoisseurs may worry about what edible mushrooms will be available this summer. But in many cases biodiversity scientists recognize that the community of organisms and the ecosystem that contains them would be a more appropriate unit of analysis. But as the number of species in an ecosystem increases, the complexity of the ecosystem becomes unmanageable. A single ecosystem may have hundreds to thousands of species, and we are in the infant stage of trying to determine how to study these biological systems.

One result is that, given that there are perhaps 10 million species on Earth and only perhaps 10,000 biologists who study biodiversity, where do we begin? The first and most popular way to answer this question is to pick a single species and concentrate on understanding its ecology. This makes are researcher’s life fairly simple. If elephants in Africa are under threat, find out all about the ecology of elephants. If a particular butterfly in England is very rare, try to find out why and how to protect them. This kind of research is very valuable for conservation because it provides a detailed background for understanding the requirements of each species. But the single species approaches lead into at least two quagmires. First, all species exist in a web of other species and understanding this web greatly expands the problem. It is possible in many cases to decipher the effects other species have on our elephants or butterflies, but this requires many more scientists to assist in analysing the species’ food chain, its diseases, its predators and parasites, and that is only a start. The second quagmire is that one of the general rules of ecology is that most species on Earth are rare, and few are common. So that we must concentrate our person-power on the common species because they are easier to find and study. But it is often the rare species that are of conservation concern, and so we should focus on them rather than the common species. In particular, given that only about 10% of the species on Earth have been described scientifically, we may often be assigned a species that does not have any information on its food habits or habitat requirements, its distribution, and how its abundance might be changing over time, a lifetime research program.

The result of this general overview is that the mantra of our day – Protect Biodiversity – begins as a compelling slogan and ends in enormous scientific complexity. As such it falls into the category of slogans like ‘Reduce Poverty’ and ‘Peace on Earth’, something we can all agree on, but the devil is in the details of how to achieve that particular goal.

One way to avoid all these pitfalls has been to jump over the problems of individual species and analyse communities of species or entire ecosystems. The result of this approach is to boil down all the species in the community to a number that estimates “biodiversity” and then use that number in relating ‘biodiversity’ to community attributes like ‘productivity’ or ‘stability’. This approach leads to testing hypotheses like ‘Higher biodiversity leads to greater stability’. There are serious problems with this approach if it is used to test any such hypothesis. First, biodiversity in this example must be rigorously defined as well as stability. The fact that higher biodiversity of butterflies in a particular region is associated with a more stable abundance of these butterflies over time is worthy of note but not of generalization to global communities or ecosystems. And as in all ecological studies we do not know if this is a generalization applicable to all butterfly populations everywhere until many more studies have been done.

A second problem is that this community or ecosystem approach to address ecological questions about biodiversity is not very useful in promoting conservation which boils down to particular species in particular environments. It should force us back to looking at the population ecology of species that are of conservation concern. It is population ecologists who must push forward the main goals of the conservation of the Earth’s biota, as Caughley (1994) recognized long ago.

The practical goals of conservation have always been local, and this constraint is mostly ignored in papers that demand some global research priorities and global ecological rules. The broad problem is that the conservation of biodiversity is a gigantic scientific and political problem that is currently underfunded and in its scientific infancy. At the present too much biodiversity research is short-term and not structured in a comprehensive framework that identifies critical problems and concentrates research efforts on these problems (Nichols et al. 2019, Sutherland et al. 2018). One more important issue for a seminar discussion group. 

Caughley, G. (1994). Directions in conservation biology. Journal of Animal Ecology 63, 215-244. doi: 10.2307/5542

Nichols, J.D., Kendall, W.L., and Boomer, G.S. (2019). Accumulating evidence in ecology: Once is not enough. Ecology and Evolution 9, 13991-14004. doi: 10.1002/ece3.5836.

Sutherland, W.J., Butchart, Stuart H.M., Connor, B., Culshaw, C., Dicks, L.V., et al. (2018). A 2018 Horizon Scan of Emerging Issues for Global Conservation and Biological Diversity. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, 47-58. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.11.006.

Some Simple Arithmetic

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In this year of Covid, we all listen to the news media about the need for the governments of the world to support the economy, and the fiscal price of such support. This has given me the interest to do a bit of simple arithmetic. Arithmetic has no political agenda, and this blog is not about ecological principles, but is rather an attempt to bring the world of numbers into some kind of common sense.

I can start anywhere, but since I am in Canada, I will pick first on it. This week we were told that the Federal Government of Canada took on $ 144.5 billion in debt in 2021, and this has moved the country to a federal debt of more than $ 1 trillion. These numbers are completely opaque to me so I will do some arithmetic on them to encourage understanding.

First, write out one hundred forty-four billion dollars. $144,500,000,000. Now convert this to per capita debt by dividing it by the entire population of Canada, 38 million people, or 38,000,000 give or take a few. This provides us with $ 3802.63 that each of us owe our Canadian government for 2021 to eliminate the 2021 deficit. Now let us imagine that we are very patriotic and wish to pay off all our Federal debt in Canada this year. The simple arithmetic now shows that each of us needs to pay $ 26,316.00 to clear our total Federal debt to zero. Depending on where you are sitting, this is very much money or very little. If you want to buy a house in Vancouver, it will cost you on average $ 1,210,000.00 so that your “debt” to cover our total Federal debt to date would be about 2% of the price of your house. If you live in the rest of Canada, your “debt” would amount to about 5% of the average house cost. I leave you to decide if this is a large problem or a small problem.

The USA is a bit more in Federal debt at $ 28.9 trillion, which works out to about $87,000. per person to pay off the entire current debt now, or about $8400 for each resident to pay off the federal deficit of $2.77 trillion for 2021 alone.

One bank in Canada just spent $ 17 billion to buy another Bank in California. Imagine of even a small part of the $17 billion was used to deliver housing to poor people. We can translate $17 billion or perhaps to be generous say only $10 billion of this excess profit into small houses for homeless people. With these numbers, we could build 1600 small houses for the poor (if we estimate about $60,000 to build a small 700 sq. ft. house in 2021). Or at $ 80,000,000. per medium size hospital, we could build 125 hospitals across Canada.

These kinds of figures are a bit sobering for a retired person, and of course are highly oversimplified since they omit individual debts and state and provinces debts. One’s view of all this seems to fall into two or three camps. First, and most simply we will grow our economy out of the debts as we did after World War II. This simple solution would appear to run into the eternal growth problem. Second, we really have no problem at all since Modern Monetary Theory (Kelton 2020) suggests that governments just keep printing more money and carry on as long as the interest rate stays low, and the printing presses do not wear out. This will work well for large countries but not for small ones, so if you live in Belgium, you will probably have a different view of this than if you live in the USA or China. Third, we will have to pay the piper in one way or another, and we may be in for a rough ride in the future. I do not pretend to understand the economics of all this and hence for me this is only a blog about arithmetic.

If there is a recommendation that might follow from this simple analysis it is that radio and TV announcers should translate these kinds of financial data into real-world numbers, even if it must be something like $1 billion is 10 cups of Starbucks coffee for every adult living in Canada today, or 1 coffee for every adult living in the USA, or $10 a day childcare for one year for 400,000 children. That would at least translate financial data into something useful.  

Kelton, S. 2020.The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy.  Public Affairs, Hatchette Book Group, New York. 336 pp. ISBN-13: 9781541736184.

Have We Lost the Plot?

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The decisions we make as a society depend directly on what knowledge we have achieved through our educational system. Two major problems the Earth faces occupy the day – the Covid epidemic and climate change. In both major emergencies, a significant fraction of humanity seems to have completely missed the plot and I would like to ask a few simple questions about why this might be.

The Covid epidemic is indeed a global emergency, and if you do not recognize this you should stop reading here. We have had major human epidemics in the last 1000 years so we might start by asking what knowledge we have garnered from past events. Epidemics occur because a particular disease is transmissible among people, and the three most obvious observations that could be made from previous epidemics are that large groups of people should not congregate, travel should be restricted, and that people should always wear a mask, a point made very clearly in the 1918 flu epidemic. More recent medical studies since the 1940s have shown conclusively that immunity to any particular disease can be achieved by vaccination programs, and many people have been vaccinated over their lifespan to reduce greatly the chance of infection. So, to make the point simple, many people are alive today because of the vaccinations they have received over time.

Vaccine hesitancy at this time with respect to the Covid epidemic has been decreasing, and as more of the population becomes vaccinated, disease incidence should decline. My question is how did many people become educated in our schools about these general points and then join the anti-vaxxers? I do not know the answer to this, but at least part of the answer might be a failure of our education systems.

A second emergency over climate change will probably be with us for a much longer time than the Covid pandemic, so we need to think very clearly about it. The problem in part is that climate change is long term (10-100+ years) and it is difficult to change human behaviour in a short time. Consequently, advances like renewable energy, solar panels on roofs, electric cars, and good insulation in houses need to be pushed by government policies. Since governments are too often concerned only about the next 4 years, and all the good policies will result in rising taxes, there is much talking but little action. Longer term issues like population control are too often swept under the table as too hot to handle. News outlets push panic buttons over reduced birth rates in the world today and translate this into immediate population collapse. Elementary issues of human demography that ought to be part of any curriculum are not understood, and the failure to appreciate the consequences of continued growth seem lost on much of the population. Consequently, part of our current problems involving action on the climate emergency must be laid to poor education about these simple matters.

We have gone through a long period when economics triumphed over ecology and sustainability, but that problem is rapidly being rectified. More people are recognizing that a single country cannot ignore global problems, conservation is strong on the agenda of many governments, although again these issues emit more talk than actions.

I certainly do not know the solution to these current issues but the polarization in the world today is strong enough to prohibit many policies being achieved that would improve and overcome our present emergencies. Unless we can achieve agreement on sustainable goals for all of society these emergencies will continue to build. Thinking that I could fly to Mars and get away from these problems is something even the British royalty recognize as ridiculous.

A few possible ideas:

  1. Call out and protest as much as you can about uninformed pseudo-scientific comments on ecology, economics, medical science, and sustainability. Demand political action on these two global emergencies now.
  2. Improve our education systems to demand a curriculum that addresses current problems of climate change and agriculture, population growth, medical history, disease, and the history of the biosphere.
  3. Get accurate data on global change and Covid from reliable sources.
  4. Never give up. Present scientific truth to counteract nonsense.
  5. And use social media effectively to improve communication of the science that speaks to the solution of these major problems.

Kolata, Gina B. (2019) Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that caused it.’ Atria Books: New York. 352 pp. ISBN: 978-0743203982

MacKenzie, Debora (2020) COVID-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One. Hachette Books: New York. 304 pp. IBN: 978-0306924248  (Published in North America in 2021 as Stopping the Next Pandemic, 339 pp. ISBN 978-036924224.)

Piketty, Thomas (2021). Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021
Yale University Press: New Haven, Connecticut. 360 pp. ISBN: 978-0300259667

Salamon, Margaret Klein (2020). Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth. New Society Publishers: Gabriola Island, B.C. Canada. 160 pp. ISBN: 978-0865719415

Whither the Big Questions in Ecology?

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The science of ecology grows and grows and perhaps it is time to recognize the subcultures of the discipline which operate as nearly independent areas of science. Few people today would talk of the science of physics or the science of chemistry, but rather the subcultures of physics or chemistry in which critical problems are defined and tested. In a sense this has already been recognized in ecology by the increase in specific journals. No one goes to Conservation Biology to look up recent studies in insect pest control, and no one goes to Limnology and Oceanography to research progress in theoretical ecology. So, by default we ecologists have already subdivided the overall broad science of ecology into subcultures, and the problem then arises when we must consider major issues or big questions like the ecological impacts of climate change that encompass multiple subcultures, and the more specific issue of how we educate students of all ages about the broad problems of ecology and the environment.

The education issue ought to be the easiest part of this conundrum to deal with. The simple rule – Teach the Principles – is what textbook writers try to do. But this is easier said than done. Jim Hone et al. (2015) took on the problem of defining the principles of applied ecology and consolidated these into 22 prescriptive and 3 empirical principles that could serve as a starter for this area of general ecology. The same compilation could be done in many subdisciplines of ecology and there are many good examples of this (e.g., Lidicker, 2020, Ryo et al. 2019). A plethora of ecology textbooks exist to pull the broad subject together, and they are interesting themselves in what they emphasize.  

The larger problem is in the primary literature of ecology, and I pick here four big questions in ecology in which communication could be improved that would be useful both to educators and to the public.

  1. Sustainability of the Earth’s Ecosystems. This broad area covers human population dynamics, which can be generalized to many other species by the principles of population ecology. It would include agricultural issues and the consequences of soil erosion and degradation and cover the basics of atmospheric chemistry at least to question whether everyone going to Mars is particularly useful. Where relevant, every ecological publication should address how this research addresses the large issue of sustainability.
  2. Climate Change Effects. There is a general understanding of the geographic distribution of vegetation communities on Earth, how these have changed in geologic time and are changing now but projections for the future are vague. Much research is ongoing, but the ecological time frame of research is still too short (Hagerman and Pelai 2018). Teaching what we know now would include the essential physics and chemistry of sea level rise, changes in the distribution of good and bad species, including human diseases, and simple warnings about investing in real estate in Miami Beach. Every prediction about climate change effects should include a time frame at which the predictions could be accepted or rejected. If ecologists are to affect government policies, a testable action plan must be specified lest we keep barking up the wrong tree.
  3. Current conflicts in managing the Earth’s natural resources. The concern here is the social and economic drivers of why we continue overfishing and overharvesting resources that result in damage to local environments, and how we can manage conflicts over these resources. To manage intelligently we need to understand the interactions of the major species involved in the ecological community. Ecosystem dynamics will be the central set of concepts here, and the large topic of the resilience of our Earth’s ecosystems. Ecologists are clear that the resilience of ecosystems is limited but exactly where those limits are is far from clear at the present time.
  4. Conservation of Biodiversity. The ecological factors that limit biodiversity, and the consequences of biodiversity loss are major areas of current research and communication to the public. While the volume of concern is high in this subdiscipline, advances in understanding lag far behind. We operate now with only the vaguest of principles of how to achieve conservation results. The set of conservation principles (Prober et al. 2019) interacts strongly with the 3 big questions listed above and should cover advances in paleoecology and the methods of defining ancient environments as well as current conservation problems. Understanding how social conflict resolution can be achieved in many conservation controversies links across to the social sciences here. 

The key here is that all these big questions contain hundreds of scientific problems that need investigation, and the background of all these questions should include the principles by which ecological science advances, as well as the consequences of ignoring scientific advice. For educators, all these big questions can be analysed by examples from your favourite birds, or large mammals, or conifer trees, or fishes so that as scientific progress continues, we will have increased precision in our ecological understanding of the Earth. And more than enough material to keep David Attenborough busy.

For ecologists one recommendation of looking at ecology through the lens of big questions should be to include in your communications how your findings illuminate the road to improved understanding and further insights into how the Earth’s biodiversity supports us and how we need to support it. Ecology is not the science of the total environment, but it is an essential component of it.

Hagerman, S.M. and Pelai, R. (2018). Responding to climate change in forest management: two decades of recommendations. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 16, 579-587. doi: 10.1002/fee.1974.

Hone, J., Drake, A., and Krebs, C.J. (2015). Prescriptive and empirical principles of applied ecology. Environmental Reviews 23, 170-176. doi: 10.1139/er-2014-0076.

Lidicker, W.Z. (2020). A Scientist’s Warning to humanity on human population growth. Global Ecology and Conservation 24, e01232. doi: 10.1016/j.gecco.2020.e01232.

Prober, S.M., Doerr, V.A.J., Broadhurst, L.M., Williams, K.J., and Dickson, F. (2019). Shifting the conservation paradigm: a synthesis of options for renovating nature under climate change. Ecological Monographs 89, e01333. doi: 10.1002/ecm.1333.

Ryo, M., Aguilar-Trigueros, C.A., Pinek, L., Muller, L.A.H., and Rillig, M.C. (2019). Basic Principles of Temporal Dynamics. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 34, 723-733. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2019.03.007.