Category Archives: Research Funding

Why Science is Frustrating

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Many people train in science because they are convinced that this is an important route to doing good in the world. We operate on the simple model that science leads to knowledge of how to solve problems and once we have that knowledge the application to policy and management should be reasonably simple. This model is of course wildly incomplete, so if you are a young person contemplating what to do with your life, you should perhaps think very carefully about how to achieve progress. I review here three current examples of failures of science in the timely management of acute problems.

The first and most complex current problem is the Covid-19 pandemic. Since this virus disease became a pandemic more than a year ago, many scientists have investigated how to thwart it. There was spectacular success in developing vaccines and advances in a basic understanding the virus. However, some proposals had no value, and this was often because the scientific papers involved were not yet peer reviewed but were released to the news media as though they were the truth. All the common mistakes of scientific investigation were in clear view, from simple hypotheses with no testing to a failure to consider multiple working hypotheses, to a failure to evaluate data because of non-disclosure agreements. Speed seemed to be of the essence, and if there is a sure way to accumulate poor science it is by means of speed, including little attention to experimental design, probabilities, and statistical analysis. Many books will soon appear about this pandemic, and blame for failures will be spread in all directions. Perhaps the best advice for the average person was the early advice suitable for all pandemics – avoid crowds, wash your hands, do not travel. But humans are impatient, and we await life going “back to normal”, which is to say back to rising CO2 and ignoring the poor.  

A second example is the logging of old growth forests. Ecologists all over the world from the tropics to the temperate zone have for the last 40-50 years decried logging practices that are not sustainable. Foresters have too often defended the normal practices as being sustainable with clever statements that they plant one tree for every one they cut, and look out your car window, trees are everywhere. It is now evident to anyone who opens their eyes that there is little old growth left (< 1% in British Columbia). But why does that matter when the trees are valuable and will grow back in a century or two or four? Money and jobs trump biodiversity and promises of governments adopting an “old-growth logging policy” appear regularly, to be achieved in a year or two. The tragedy is written large in the economics where for example in British Columbia the local government has spent $10 billion in the last 10 years supporting the forestry industry while the industry has contributed $6 billion in profits, not exactly a good rate of return on investment, particularly when the countryside has been laid waste in the process. Another case in which economics and government policy has trumped ecological research in the past but the need to protect old growth forests is gaining with public support now.

A third example comes again from medicine, a fertile area where money and influence too often outrace medical science. We have now a drug that is posed to alleviate or reduce the effects of Alzheimer’s, a tragic disease which affects many older people (Elmaleh et al. 2019, Nardini et al. 2021). A variety of drugs have been developed in an attempt to stop the mental deterioration of Alzheimer’s but none so far has been shown to work. A new drug (Aducanumab) is now available in the USA for treatment of Alzheimer’s but it already has a checkered history. This drug seemed to fail its first major trials yet was then approved by the Federal Drug Administration in the USA over the protests of several doctors (Knopman, Jones, and Greicius 2021). Given a cost of thousands of dollars a month for administering this new drug to a single patient, we can see the same scenario developing that we described for the forest industry and old growth logging – public pressure for new drugs resulting in questionable regulatory decisions.

There are several general messages that come out of this simple list. The most important one is that science-on-demand is not feasible for most serious problems. Plan Ahead ought to be the slogan written on every baseball hat, sombrero, Stetson, toque and turban to remind us that science takes time, as well as wisdom and money. If you think we are having problems in the current pandemic, start planning for the next one. If you think that drought is now a problem in western North America, start hedging your bets for the next drought. Sciences moves more slowly than iPhone models and requires long-term investments.

I think the bottom line of all the conflict between science and policy is discouraging for young people and scientists who are doing their best to unravel problems in modern societies and to join these solutions to public policy (González-Márquez and Toledo 2020). Examples are too numerous to list. Necessary policies for controlling climate change interfere with people’s desires for increased global travel but we now realize controls are necessary. Desirable human development goals can conflict with biodiversity conservation, but we must manage this conflict (Clémençon 2021). The example of feral horses and their effects on biodiversity in Australia and the USA is another good example of a clash of scientific goals with social preferences for horses (Boyce et al. 2021). Nevertheless, there are many cases in which public policy and conservation have joint goals (Tessnow-von Wysocki and Vadrot 2020, Holden et al. 2021). The key is to carry the scientific data and our frustration into policy discussions with social scientists and politicians. We may be losing ground in some areas but the present crises in human health and climate change present opportunities to design another kind of world than we have had for the last century.

Boyce, P. N., Hennig, J. D., Brook, R. K., and McLoughlin, P. D. (2021). Causes and consequences of lags in basic and applied research into feral wildlife ecology: the case for feral horses. Basic and Applied Ecology 53, 154-163. doi: 10.1016/j.baae.2021.03.011.

Clémençon, R. (2021). Is sustainable development bad for global biodiversity conservation? Global Sustainability 4. doi: 10.1017/sus.2021.14 2021.14.

Elmaleh, D.R., Farlow, M.R., Conti, P.S., Tompkins, R.G., Kundakovic, L., and Tanzi, R.E. (2019). Developing effective Alzheimer’s Disease therapies: Clinical experience and future directions. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 71, 715-732. doi: 10.3233/JAD-190507.

González-Márquez, I. and Toledo, V.M. (2020). Sustainability Science: A paradigm in crisis? Sustainability 12, 2802. doi: 10.3390/su12072802.

Holden, E., Linnerud, K., and Rygg, B.J. (2021). A review of dominant sustainable energy narratives. Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews 144. doi: 10.1016/j.rser.2021.110955.

Knopman, D.S., Jones, D.T., and Greicius, M.D. (2021). Failure to demonstrate efficacy of aducanumab: An analysis of the EMERGE and ENGAGE trials as reported by Biogen, December 2019. Alzheimer’s & Dementia 17, 696-701. doi:/10.1002/alz.12213.

Nardini, E., Hogan, R., Flamier, A., and Bernier, G. (2021). Alzheimer’s disease: a tale of two diseases? Neural Regeneration Research 16, 1958. doi: 10.4103/1673-5374.308070

Tessnow-von Wysocki, I. and Vadrot, A.B.M. (2020). The voice of science on marine biodiversity negotiations: A systematic literature review. Frontiers in Marine Science 7, 614282. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2020.614282.

On Innovative Ecological Research

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Ecological research should have an impact on policy development. For the most part it does not. You do not need to take my word for this, since I am over the age of 40, so for confirmation you might read the New Zealand Environmental Science Funding Review (2020) which stated:

“I am not confident that there is a coherent basis for our national investment in environmental science. I am particularly concerned that there is no mechanism that links the ongoing demand environmental reporting makes for an understanding of complex ecological processes that evolve over decades, and a science funding system that is constantly searching for innovation, impact and linkages to the ever-changing demands of business and society.” (page 3)

Of course New Zealand may be an outlier, so we must seek confirmation in the Northern Hemisphere. Bill Sutherland and his many colleagues has every 3-4 years since 2006 (nearly in concert with the lemming cycle) put out an extraordinary array of suggestions for important ecological questions that need to be answered for conservation and management. If you should be running a seminar this year, you might consider doing a historical survey of how these suggestions have changed since 2006, 2010, 2013, to 2018. Excellent questions, and how much progress has there been on answering his challenges?

Some progress to be sure, and for that we are thankful, but the problems multiply faster than ecological progress, and I am reminded of trying to stop a snow avalanche with a shovel. Why should this be? There are some very big questions in ecology that we need to answer but my first observation is that we have made little progress with the Sutherland et al. (2006) list, which would be largely culled from the previous many years of ecological studies. The first problem is that research funding is too often geared to novel and innovative proposals, so that if you would ask for funding to answer an old question that Charles Elton proposed in the 1950s, you would be struck off the list of innovative ecologists and possibly exiled to Mars with Elon Musk. Innovation in the mind of the granting agencies is based on the iPhone and the latest models of cars which have a time scale of one year. Any ecologist working on a problem that has a time scale of 30 years is behind the times. So when you write a grant request proposal you are pushed to restate the problems recognized long ago as though they were newly recognized with new methods of analysis.

There is no doubt some truly innovative ecological research, and to list these might be another interesting seminar project, but most of the environmental problems of our day are very old problems that remain unresolved. Government agencies in some countries have a list of problems of the here-and-now that university research rarely focuses on because the research cannot be innovative. These mostly practical problems must then be solved by government environmental departments with their ever-shrinking resources, so they in turn contract these out to the private sector with its checkered record of gathering the data required for solving the problems at hand.

Environmental scientists will complain that when they do reach conclusions that will at least partly resolve the problems of the day, governments refuse to act on this knowledge because of a variety of vested interests; if the environment wins, the vested interests lose, not a zero-sum game. If you want a good example, note that John Tyndall recognized CO2 and the Greenhouse Effect in 1859, and Svante Arrhenius and Thomas Chamberlin calculated in 1896 that burning fossil fuels increased CO2 such that 2 X CO2 would = + 5ºC rise in temperature. And in 2021 some people still argue about this conclusion.

My suggestion is that we would be better off striking the word ‘innovation’ from all our granting councils and environmental research funding organizations, and replacing it with ‘excellent’ and ‘well designed’ as qualities to support. You are still allowed to talk about ‘innovative’ iPhones and autos, but we are better off with ‘excellent’ environmental and ecological research.

New Zealand Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. (2020). A review of the funding and prioritisation of environmental research in New Zealand (Wellington, New Zealand.) Available online: https://www.pce.parliament.nz/publications/environmental-research-funding-review

Sutherland, W.J., et al. (2006). The identification of 100 ecological questions of high policy relevance in the UK. Journal of Applied Ecology 43, 617-627. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2006.01188.x.

Sutherland, W.J., et al. (2010). A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25, 1-7. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2009.10.003

Sutherland, W.J., (2013). Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions. Journal of Ecology 101, 58-67. doi: 10.1111/1365-2745.12025.

Sutherland, W.J., 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.

On the Focus of Biodiversity Science

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Biodiversity science has expanded in the last 25 years to include scientific disciplines that were in a previous time considered independent disciplines. Now this could be thought of as a good thing because we all want science to be interactive, so that geologists talk to ecologists who also talk to mathematicians and physicists. University administrators might welcome this movement because it could aim for a terminal condition in which all the departments of the university are amalgamated into one big universal science department of Biodiversity which would include sociology, forestry, agriculture, engineering, fisheries, wildlife, geography, and possibly law and literature as capstones. Depending on your viewpoint, there are a few problems with this vision or nightmare that are already showing up.

First and foremost is the problem of the increasing amount of specialist knowledge that is necessary to know how to be a good soil scientist, or geographer, or fisheries ecologist. So if we need teams of scientists working on a particular problem, there must be careful integration of the parts and a shared vision of how to reach a resolution of the problem. This is more and more difficult to achieve as each individual science itself becomes more and more specialized, so that for example your team now needs a soil scientist who specializes only in clay soils. The results of this problem are visible today with the Covid pandemic, many research groups working at odds to one another, many cooperating but not all, vaccine supplies being restricted by politics and nationalism, some specialists claiming that all can be cured with hydroxychloroquine or bleach. So the first problem is how to assemble a team. If you want to do this, you need to sort out a second issue.

The second hurdle is another very big issue upon which there is rarely good agreement: What are the problems you wish to solve? If you are a university department you have a very restricted range of faculty, so you cannot solve every biodiversity problem on earth. At one extreme you can have the one faculty member = one problem approach, so one person is concerned with the conservation of birds on mountain tops, another is to study frogs and salamanders in southern Ontario, and a third is to be concerned about the conservation of rare orchids in Indonesia. At the other extreme is the many faculty = one problem approach where you concentrate your research power on a very few issues. Typically one might think these should be Canadian issues if you were a Canadian university, or New Zealand issues if you were a New Zealand university. In general many universities have taken the first approach and have assumed that government departments will fill in the second approach by concentrating on major issues like fisheries declines or forest diseases.

Alas the consequences of the present system are that the government is reducing its involvement in solving large scale issues (take caribou in Canada, the Everglades in Florida, or house mice outbreaks in Australia). At the same time university budgets are being cut and there is less and less interest in contributing to the solution of environmental problems and more and more interest in fields that increase economic growth and jobs. Universities excel at short term challenges, 2–3-year problem solving, but do very poorly at long-term issues. And it is the long term problems that are destroying the Earth’s ecosystems.

The problem facing biodiversity science is exactly that no one wishes to concentrate on a single major problem, so we drift in bits and pieces, missing the chance to make any significant progress in any one of the major issues of our day. Take any major issue you wish to discuss. How many species are there on Earth? We do not even know that very well except in a few groups, so how much effort must go into taxonomy? Are insect populations declining? Data are extremely limited to a few groups gathered over a small number of years in a small part of the Earth with inadequate sampling. Within North America, why are charismatic species like monarch butterflies declining, or are they really declining? How much habitat must be protected to ensure the continuation of a migratory species like this butterfly. Can we ecologists claim that any one of our major problems are being resourced adequately to discover answers?

When biodiversity science interfaces with agricultural science and the applied sciences of fisheries and wildlife management we run into another set of major questions. Is modern agriculture sustainable? Certainly not, but how can we change it in the right direction? Are pelagic fisheries being overharvested? Questions abound, answers are tentative and need more evidence. Is biodiversity science supposed to provide solutions to these kinds of applied ecological questions? The current major question that appears in most biodiversity papers is how will biodiversity respond to climate change?  This is in principle a question that can be answered at the local species or community scale, but it provides no resolution to the problem of biodiversity loss or indeed even allows adequate data gathering to map the extent and reality of loss. Are we back to mapping the chairs on the Titanic but now with detailed satellite data?

What can be done about this lack of focus in biodiversity science? At the broadest level we need to increase discussions about what we are trying to accomplish in the current state of scientific organization. Trying to write down the problems we are currently studying and then the possible ways in which the problem can be resolved would be a good start. If we recognize a major problem but then can see no possible way of resolving it, perhaps our research or management efforts should be redirected. But it takes great courage to say here is a problem in biodiversity conservation, but it can never be solved with a finite budget (Buxton et al. 2021). So start by asking: why am I doing this research, and where do I think we might be in 50 years on this issue? Make a list of insoluble problems. Here is a simple one to start on: eradicating invasive species. Perhaps eradication can be done in some situations like islands (Russell et al. 2016) but is impossible in the vast majority of cases. There may be major disagreements over goals, in which case some rules might be put forward, such as a budget of $5 million over 4 years to achieve the specified goal. Much as we might like, biodiversity conservation cannot operate with an infinite budget and an infinite time frame.

Buxton, R.T., Nyboer, E.A., Pigeon, K.E., Raby, G.D., and Rytwinski, T. (2021). Avoiding wasted research resources in conservation science. Conservation Science and Practice 3. doi: 10.1111/csp2.329.

Russell, J.C., Jones, H.P., Armstrong, D.P., Courchamp, F., and Kappes, P.J. (2016). Importance of lethal control of invasive predators for island conservation. Conservation Biology 30, 670-672. doi: 10.1111/cobi.12666.

On Citations and Scientific Research in Ecology

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Begin with a few common assumptions in science.
(1) Higher citation rates define more valuable science
(2) Recent references are more valuable than older references
(3) Retracted scientific research is rapidly recognized and dropped from discussion
(4) The vast majority of scientific research reported in papers is read by other scientists.
(5) Results cited in scientific papers are cited correctly in subsequent references.

The number of publications in ecological science is growing rapidly world-wide, and a corollary of this must be that the total number of citations is growing even more rapidly (e.g. Westgate et al. 2020). It is well recognized that citations are unevenly spread among published papers, and reports that nearly 50% of published papers never receive any citations at all are commonly cited. I have not been able to validate this for papers in the ecological sciences. The more important question is whether the most highly cited papers are the most significant for progress in ecological understanding. If this is the case, you can simply ignore the vast majority of the published literature and save reading time. But this seems unlikely to be correct for ecological science.

The issue of scientific importance is a time bomb partly because ‘importance’ may be redefined over time as sciences mature, and this redefinition may occur in years or tens of years. A classic example is the citation history of Charles Elton’s (1958) book on invasions (Richardson and Pyšek 2008). Published in 1958, this book had almost no citations until the 1990s. Citations have become more and more important in the ranking of individual scholars as well as university departments during the last 20 years (Keville et al. 2017). This has occurred despite continuous warnings that citations are not valid for comparing individuals of different age or departments in different academic fields (Patience et al. 2017). If you publish in Covid-19 research this year, you are likely to get more citations than the person working in earthworm taxonomy.

Most published papers confirm the general belief that citing the most recent papers is more successful than citing older papers. If this belief could be tested, it would simplify education of graduate students and facilitate teaching. But the simple fact is that in ecology often (but not always) older papers have better perspectives than more recent papers or indicate paths of research that have failed to lead to ecological wisdom. 

Newspapers revel in stories of retracted research, if only to show that scientists are human. Of some interest are studies that show that research which is retracted continues to be cited. Hagberg (2020) cites a case in which a paper was retracted but continued to be cited as much after retraction as before. Fortunately, retracted research is rare in the ecological sciences but not absent, but the various conflicting ways in which scientific journals deal with papers with fraudulent results discovered after they are published leave much to be desired. 

A final comment on references is a warning to anyone reading the discussion or conclusions of a paper. Smith and Cumberledge (2020) have reported a random sample of references in a variety of scientific papers indicated a 25% error rate in ‘quotation’ errors. Quotation errors are distinct from ‘citation errors’ which are minor mistakes in the year of publication, page numbers or names in citations given in papers. Quotation errors are examples of “original paper authors say XX, citing paper says YY, a contradiction to what was originally reported. They used 250 citations from the 5 most highly cited scientific publications of today to determine how many papers contained ‘quotation errors’ and found a 25% error rate. About 33% of these errors could be called ‘Unsubstantiated’ and about 50% of the remaining quotation errors were ‘Impossible to substantiate” category. Their study reinforced early work by Todd et al. (2007) and pointed out to readers a weakness in the current use of references in scientific writing that is often missed by reviewers.

On a more positive note, on how to increase your citation rate, Murphy et al. (2019) surveyed the titles of 3562 papers and their subsequent citation rate from four ecology and entomology journals. They found that papers that did not include the Latin name of species in the title of the paper were cited 47% more often than papers with Latin names in the title. The number of words in the title of the paper had almost no effect on citation rates. They were unable to determine whether the injection of humor in the title of the paper had any effect on citation rates because too few papers attempted humor in the title.   

Elton, C.S. (1958) ‘The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants.’ (Methuen: London.) ISBN: 978-3-030-34721-5

Hagberg, J.M. (2020). The unfortunately long life of some retracted biomedical research publications. Journal of Applied Physiology 128, 1381-1391. doi: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00003.2020.

Keville, M.P., Nelson, C.R., and Hauer, F.R. (2017). Academic productivity in the field of ecology. Ecosphere 8, e01620. doi: 10.1002/ecs2.1620.

Murphy, S.M., Vidal, M.C., Hallagan, C.J., Broder, E.D., and Barnes, E.E. (2019). Does this title bug (Hemiptera) you? How to write a title that increases your citations. Ecological Entomology 44, 593-600. doi: 10.1111/een.12740.

Patience, G.S., Patience, C.A., Blais, B., and Bertrand, F. (2017). Citation analysis of scientific categories. Heliyon 3, e00300. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2017.e00300.

Richardson, D.M. and Pyšek, P. (2008). Fifty years of invasion ecology – the legacy of Charles Elton. Diversity and Distributions 14, 161-168. doi: 10.1111/j.1472-4642.2007.00464.x.

Smith, N. and Cumberledge, A. (2020). Quotation errors in general science journals. Proceedings of the Royal Society. A, 476, 20200538. doi: 10.1098/rspa.2020.0538.

Todd, P.A., Yeo, D.C.J., Li, D., and Ladle, R.J. (2007). Citing practices in ecology: can we believe our own words? Oikos 116, 1599-1601. doi: 10.1111/j.2007.0030-1299.15992.x

Westgate, M.J., Barton, P.S., Lindenmayer, D.B., and Andrew., N.R. (2020). Quantifying shifts in topic popularity over 44 years of Austral Ecology. Austral Ecology 45, 663-671. doi: 10.1111/aec.12938.

On a Department of Monitoring Biology

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Begin with the current university structure in North America. Long ago it was simple: a Department of Biology, a Department of Microbiology, a Department of Forestry, and possibly a Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Management. We could always justify a Department of Microbiology because people get sick, a Department of Forestry because people buy wood to build houses, and a Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Management because people fish and hunt. But what are we going to do with a Department of Biology? It rarely deals with anything that will make money, so we divide it into interest groups, a Department of Botany, and a Department of Zoology. All is well. But now a new kid appears on the block, Molecular Biology, and it claims to be able to solve all the issues that were formerly considered the focus of Botany and Zoology and probably several other departments. Give us all the money, the molecular world shouted, and we will solve all your problems and do it quickly. So now we get a complete hassle for money, buildings and prestige, and the world turns on which of the bevy of bureaucrats races to the top to make all the major decisions. If you wish to have proof of concept, ask anyone you can find who teaches at a university if he or she was ever consulted about what direction the university should take.

At this point we begin to proceed based on ‘follow the money’. So, for example if the Department of Forestry gets the most money from whomever, it must get the biggest buildings, the largest salaries, and the newest appointments. So soon you have a system of intrigue that would rival the Vatican. The winners of late are those departments that have most to do with people, health, and profit. So Medical Schools march on, practical matters like economics and engineering do well, and molecular biology rises rapidly.

What has happened to the old Departments of Botany and Zoology? They make no profit; their only goal is to enrich our lives and our understanding of the world around us. How can we make them profitable? A new program races to the rescue, a Department of Biodiversity, which will include everyone in plant, animal and microbe science who cannot get into one of the more practical, rich, existing departments. The program now is to convince the public and the governments that biodiversity is important and must be funded more. David Attenborough to the fore, and we are all abandoning the old botany and zoology and moving to biodiversity.

Now the problem arises for ecologists. Biodiversity includes everything, so where do we start? If we have so far described and named only about 15% of the life on Earth, should we put all our money into descriptive taxonomy? Should we do more biogeography, more ecology, more modelling, or more taxonomy, or a bit of all? So, the final question of our quest arrives: what should we be doing in a Department of Biodiversity if indeed we get one?

If you have ever been involved in herding cats, or even sheep without a dog you can imagine what happens if you attempt to set a priority in any scientific discipline. The less developed the science, the more the arguments about where to put our money and people. Ecology is a good example because it has factions with no agreement at all about what should be done to hasten progress. The result is that we fall back on the Pied Pipers of the day, form bandwagons, and move either forward, sideways, or backwards depending on who is in charge.

So, let us step back and think amid all this fighting for science funding. The two major crises of our time are human population growth and the climate change emergency. In fact, there is only one major crisis, climate change, because as it apparently progresses, everything will be overwhelmed in a way only few can try to guess (Wallace-Wells 2019, Lynas 2020). After some discussion you might suggest that we do two things in biology: first, get a good grip on what we have now on Earth, and second, keep monitoring life on Earth as the climate emergency unravels so that we can respond with mitigation as required. This is not to say we should stop doing other things. We should be more than unifactorial scientists, and it may be a small recommendation to the world of thinkers that we consider endowing at least some universities with a Department of Monitoring Biology and endow it with enough funding to do the job well. (Lindenmayer 2018; Lindenmayer et al. 2018; Nichols et al. 2019). It might be our best investment in the future of biology.

Lindenmayer, D. (2018). Why is long-term ecological research and monitoring so hard to do? (And what can be done about it). Australian Zoologist 39: 576-580. doi: 10.7882/az.2017.018.

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.

Lynas, Mark (2020) ‘Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency’. 4th Estate, Harper Collins, London. E book ISBN: 978-0008308582

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.

Wallace-Wells, David (2019) ‘The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming ‘ Tim Duggan Books: New York. 304 pp. ISBN: 978-0-525-57670-9.  

How should biodiversity research be directed?

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There are many scientific papers and news reports currently that state that biodiversity is in rapid decline on Earth. No evidence is usually cited for this statement – it is considered to be self evident. What follows from that is typically a panic request for more work on declining populations, more money for conservation NGOs and national parks. Political ecology statements that request more money for ecological research are certainly on the right track if we are to understand how to achieve conservation of our biota. But the question I want to raise here is how to proceed on this broad issue in a logical manner. To do this I will not discuss political ecology or how to gain more donors for conservation agencies, valuable services to be sure. But behind all this advertising is a scientific agenda which needs careful consideration.    

Problem #1 is to determine if there is a problem. In some areas of conservation ecology there is much agreement on principles – we all agree that we are losing natural areas for urban and agricultural development, that we need more protected areas, that most protected areas are not large enough, that there are serious problems with poaching of wildlife and lumber in some protected areas, and that global pollution is affecting much of our biodiversity. In other areas of conservation ecology there is much controversy about details. Is global biodiversity in rapid decline (Vellend et al. 2017, Cardinale et al. 2018)? How can we best identify species at risk, and once we identify them, what can we do to prevent population collapse?

The answer to Problem #1 is that there are problems in some areas but not in others, in some taxonomic groups, but not in others, but overall the data are completely inadequate for a clear statement that overall biodiversity is in global decline (Dornelas et al. 2019). The problems of biodiversity conservation are local and group specific, which leads us to Problem #2.

Problem # 2 is to go back to the ecological details, concentrating on local and specific problems, exactly what should we do, and what can we do? The problems here relate almost entirely to ecological methods – how do we estimate species abundances particularly for rare species? How do we deal with year to year changes in communities? How long should a monitoring program continue until it has reliable conclusions about biodiversity change? None of these questions are simple to answer and require much discussion which is currently under way. How long is a long-term study? It might be something like 30 generations for vertebrate species or even longer, but what is it for earthworms or bark beetles? How can we best sample the variety of insects in an ecosystem in which they might be in decline (Habel et al. 2019)?

We need to scale our conservation studies for particular species, and this has led us into the Species-At-Risk dilemma. We can gather data for a specific geographical area like Canada on the species that we deem at risk. Typically, these are vertebrates, and we ignore the insects, microbes, and the rest of the community. We try to identify threatening processes for each species and write a detailed report (Bird and Hodges 2017). The action plan specified can rarely be carried out because it is multi-year and expensive, so the matter rests. For many of these species at risk and for almost all that are ignored the central problem is action – what could you do about a declining species-at-risk, given funds and person-power? We do what we can on a local scale on the principle that it is better to do something than nothing (Westwood et al. 2019). But too often even if we have a good ecological understanding of declines, for example in mountain caribou in Canada, little or nothing is done (Palm et al. 2020). Conservation collides with economics.

I will try to draw a few possible conclusions out of this general discussion.

  1. It is far from clear that global biodiversity is declining rapidly.
  2. On a local level we can do careful evaluations for some species at risk and take possible action if funding is available.
  3. Setting aside large areas of habitat is currently the best immediate conservation strategy. Managing land use is critical.
  4. Designing strong monitoring programs is essential to discover population and community trends so that, if action can be taken, it is not too late.
  5. Climate change will have profound biodiversity effects in the long run, and conservation scientists must work short-term but plan long-term.

As we take actions for conservation, we ought to keep in mind the central question: What will this ecosystem look like in 100 or 200 years? Perhaps that could be a t-shirt slogan.

Bird, S.C., and Hodges, K.E. (2017). Critical habitat designation for Canadian listed species: Slow, biased, and incomplete. Environmental Science & Policy 71, 1-8. doi: 10.1016/j.envsci.2017.01.007.

Cardinale, B.J., Gonzalez, A., Allington, G.R.H., and Loreau, M. (2018). Is local biodiversity declining or not? A summary of the debate over analysis of species richness time trends. Biological Conservation 219, 175-183. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2017.12.021.

Dornelas, M., Gotelli, N.J., Shimadzu, H., Moyes, F., Magurran, A.E., and McGill, B.J. (2019). A balance of winners and losers in the Anthropocene. Ecology Letters 22, 847-854. doi: 10.1111/ele.13242.

Habel, J.C., Samways, M.J., and Schmitt, T. (2019). Mitigating the precipitous decline of terrestrial European insects: Requirements for a new strategy. Biodiversity and Conservation 28, 1343-1360. doi: 10.1007/s10531-019-01741-8.

Palm, E.C., Fluker, S., Nesbitt, H.K., Jacob, A.L., and Hebblewhite, M. (2020). The long road to protecting critical habitat for species at risk: The case of southern mountain woodland caribou. Conservation Science and Practice 2 (7). doi: 10.1111/csp2.219.

Vellend, M., Dornelas, M., Baeten, L., Beauséjour, R., Brown, C.D., De Frenne, P., Elmendorf, S.C., et. al. (2017). Estimates of local biodiversity change over time stand up to scrutiny. Ecology 98, 583-590. doi: 10.1002/ecy.1660.

Westwood, A.R., Otto, S.P., Mooers, A., Darimont, C., Hodges, K.E., Johnson, C., Starzomski, B. et al. (2019). Protecting biodiversity in British Columbia: Recommendations for developing species at risk legislation. FACETS 4, 136-160. doi: 10.1139/facets-2018-0042.

The Central Predicament of Ecological Science

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Ecology like all the hard sciences aims to find generalizations that are eternally true. Just as physicists assume that the universal law of gravitation will still be valid 10,000 years from now, so do ecologists assume that we can find laws or generalizations for populations and ecosystems that will be valid into the future. But the reality for ecological science is quite different. If the laws of ecology depend on the climate being stable, soil development being ongoing, evolution being optimized, and extinction being slow in human-generation time, we are in serious trouble.

Paleoecology is an important subdiscipline of ecology because, like human history, we need to understand the past. But the generalizations of paleoecology may be of little use to understand the future changes the Earth faces for one major reason – human disturbance of both climate and landscapes. Climates are changing due to rising greenhouse gases that have a long half-life. Land and water are being appropriated by a rising human population that is very slow to stabilize, so natural habitats are continually lost. There is little hope in the absence of an Apocalypse that these forces will alleviate during the next 200 years. Given these changes in the Anthropocene where does ecology sit and what can we do about it?

If climate is a major driver of ecological systems, as Andrewartha and Birch (1954) argued (to the scorn of the Northern Hemisphere ecologists of the time), the rules of the past will not necessarily apply to a future in which climate is changing. Plant succession, that slow and orderly process we now use to predict future communities, will change in speed and direction under the influence of climatic shifts and the introduction of new plant species, plant pests, and diseases that we have little control over. Technological optimists in agriculture and forestry assume that by genetic manipulations and proper artificial selection we can outwit climate change and solve pest problems, and we can only hope that they are successful. Understanding all these changes in slow-moving ecosystems depends on climate models that are accurate in projecting future climate changes. Success to date has been limited because of both questionable biology and poor statistical procedures in climate models (Frank 2019; Kumarathunge et al. 2019; Yates et al. 2018).

If prediction is the key to ecological understanding, as Houlahan et al. (2017) have cogently argued, we are in a quandary if the models that provide predictions wander with time to become less predictive. Yates et al. (2018) have provided an excellent review of the challenges of making good models for ecological prediction. As such their review is either encouraging – ‘here are the challenges in bold type’ – or terribly depressing – ‘where are the long-term, precise data for predictive model evaluation?’ My colleagues and I have spent 47 years trying to provide reliable data on one small part of the boreal forest ecosystem, and the models we have developed to predict changes in this ecosystem are probably still too imprecise to use for management. Additional years of observations produce some ecosystem states that have been predictable but other changes that we have never seen before over this time frame of nearly 50 years.

In contrast to the optimism of Yates et al. (2018), Houlahan et al. (2017) state that:

“Ecology, with a few exceptions, has abandoned prediction and therefore the ability to demonstrate understanding. Here we address how this has inhibited progress in ecology and explore how a renewed focus on prediction would benefit ecologists. The lack of emphasis on prediction has resulted in a discipline that tests qualitative, imprecise hypotheses with little concern for whether the results are generalizable beyond where and when the data were collected.  (page 1)

I see this difference in views as a dilemma because despite much talk, there is little money or interest in the field work that would deliver reliable data for models in order to test their accuracy in predictions at small and large scales. An example this year is the failure of the expected large salmon runs to the British Columbia fishery, with model failure partly due to the lack of monitoring in the North Pacific (https://globalnews.ca/news/5802595/bc-salmon-stocks-plunge/; https://www.citynews1130.com/2019/09/09/worst-year-for-salmon/ , and in contrast with Alaska runs: https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2019/07/25/bristol-bay-sockeye-harvest-blowing-away-forecast-once-again/ ). Whatever the cause of the failure of B.C. salmon runs in 2019, the lack of precision in models of a large commercial fishery that has been studied for at least 65 yeas is not a vote of confidence in our current ecological modelling.

Andrewartha, H.G. and Birch, L.C. (1954) ‘The Distribution and Abundance of Animals.’ University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 782 pp.

Frank, P. (2019). Propagation of error and the reliability of global air temperature projections. Frontiers in Earth Science 7, 223. doi: 10.3389/feart.2019.00223.

Houlahan, J.E., McKinney, S.T., Anderson, T.M., and McGill, B.J. (2017). The priority of prediction in ecological understanding. Oikos 126, 1-7. doi: 10.1111/oik.03726.

Kumarathunge, D.P., Medlyn, B.E., Drake, J.E., Tjoelker, M.G., Aspinwall, M.J., et al. (2019). Acclimation and adaptation components of the temperature dependence of plant photosynthesis at the global scale. New Phytologist 222, 768-784. doi: 10.1111/nph.15668.

Yates, K.L., Bouchet, P.J., Caley, M.J., Mengersen, K., Randin, C.F., Parnell, S., Fielding, A.H., Bamford, A.J., et al. (2018). Outstanding challenges in the transferability of ecological models. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, 790-802. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2018.08.001.

Economics from a naïve non-economist

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If you spend time in the world of social media, you may already know about the University of California vs. Elsevier Publishers on the economics of publishing scientific journal papers. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/uc-elsevier-publisher/583909/ and the background information in https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science for a sample discussion. Now I know nothing in particular about economics but I can perhaps add a footnote to this discussion from the point of view of having published ecology textbooks and investigated their cost.

Perhaps 20 years ago I had a good conversation with an honest person in the know of a book company I have sometimes published with, regarding the costs of publishing textbooks. At that point in the Stone Age, biology texts were about $100 or slightly less, and often some publishers would put out a paperback version of the same text at a much cheaper price, perhaps $35 or $40 for sale outside of North America. I thought that perhaps they ought to allow students in North America to buy the cheaper paper version, so I enquired about costs. The bottom line is that it cost perhaps $0.25 more for publishing a copy of the hardback versus the cheaper soft paperback version. The quality of the paper was no different in the two versions, and thus the costs of production were very close while the prices to the buyer were greatly different. This could be explained by putting all the heavy costs on the hardback copy because it takes a lot of editing and printing to set up the book for a printing run. So, one could argue that the cost difference should not rest on the costs of the paper alone. This led into an interesting conversation that is now only a memory for me since the CIA did not yet at that time record all phone calls of suspicious academics like ecologists. I was told that the publisher who must remain nameless wished to achieve a profit of 35-40% per year of costs for any book. Not all books sell well, and after a few years sales drop off and the whole process begins again. But my naïve question was where can I invest my savings to get a return of even 25% per year? At the present time I can perhaps get 1% per year in the bank. The author of your textbook gets perhaps 2% to 3% of the money you pay for your text, so I do not think this problem rests with the author’s excess profits.

I found it insane that anyone could simply assume that such profits are reasonable in a world that is sustainable. Yet I think now that this is a typical economic viewpoint that underlies the problems of inequality in our world, and the general rule that the rich get richer and the poor get little. So Elsevier publishes research papers that rest in large part on research work paid for by the government, with the researchers being paid for by universities or public agencies, and virtually all the preparation of the published results being done by the researchers, and then as the final blow the publisher wishes to charge the research worker (or their university) for the actual published article. So, for the moment the University of California has set a halt to this profit charade. I am sure we will soon see a set of tearful articles from publishers that they are themselves in the poorhouse and do not make enough profit as, for example, comparable corporations such as Shell Oil or Facebook. So be it.

A cheer for those scientific journals that do not ride this profit bandwagon, and the editors that are not paid for all their work, and the scientists who review submitted papers to improve them and are paid nothing for their extra effort. Perhaps someday we can be finished with the modern economic theory that seems to treat the world as a large Ponzi Scheme, and return to a saner sustainable economic world.

Is Conservation Ecology Destroying Ecology?

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Ecology became a serious science some 100 years ago when the problems that it sought to understand were clear and simple: the reasons for the distribution and abundance of organisms on Earth. It subdivided fairly early into three parts, population, community, and ecosystem ecology. It was widely understood that to understand population ecology you needed to know a great deal about physiology and behaviour in relation to the environment, and to understand community ecology you had to know a great deal about population dynamics. Ecosystem ecology then moved into community ecology plus all the physical and chemical interactions with the whole environment. But the sciences are not static, and ecology in the past 60 years has come to include nearly everything from chemistry and geography to meteorological sciences, so if you tell someone you are an ‘ecologist’ now, they have only a vague idea of what you do.

The latest invader into the ecology sphere has been conservation biology so that in the last 20 years it has become a dominant driver of ecological concerns. This has brought ecology into the forefront of publicity and the resulting political areas of controversy, not necessarily bad but with some scientific consequences. ‘Bandwagons’ are for the most part good in science because it attracts good students and professors and brings public support on side. Bandwagons are detrimental when they draw too much of the available scientific funding away from critical basic research and champion scientific fads.

The question I wish to raise is whether conservation ecology has become the latest fad in the broad science of ecology and whether this has derailed important background research. Conservation science begins with the broad and desirable goal of preserving all life on Earth and thus thwarting extinctions. This is an impossible goal and the question then becomes how can we trim it down to an achievable scientific aim? We could argue that the most important goal is to describe all the species on Earth, so that we would then know what “money” we have in the “bank”. But if we look at the insects alone, we see that this is not an achievable goal in the short term. And the key to many of these issues is what we mean by “the short term”. If we are talking10 years, we may have very specific goals, if 100 years we may redesign the goal posts, and if 1000 years again our views might change.

This is a key point. As humans we design our goals in the time frames of months and a few years, not in general in geological time. Because of climate change we are now being forced to view many things in a shorter and shorter time frame. If you live in Miami, you should do something about sea level rise now. If you grow wheat in Australia, you should worry about decreasing annual rainfall. But science in general does not have a time frame. Technology does, and we need a new phone every year, but the understanding of cancer or the ecology of tropical rain forests does not have a deadline.

But conservation biology has a ticking clock called extinction. Now we can compound our concerns about climate change and conservation to capture more of the funding for biological research in order to prevent extinctions of rare and endangered species. 

Ecological science over the past 40 years has been progressing slowly through population ecology into community and ecosystem ecology while learning that the details of populations are critical to the understanding of community function and learning how communities operate is necessary for understanding ecosystem change. None of this has been linear progress but rather a halting progression with many deviations and false leads. In order to push this agenda forward more funding has clearly been needed because teams of researchers are needed to understand a community and even more people to study an ecosystem. At the same time the value of long-term studies has become evident and equipment has become more expensive.

We have now moved into the Anthropocene in which in my opinion the focus has shifted completely from trying to answer the primary problems of ecological science to the conservation of organisms. In practice this has too often resulted in research that could only be called poor population ecology. Poor in the sense of the need for immediate short-term answers for declining species populations with no proper understanding of the underlying problem. We are faced with calls for funding that are ‘crying wolf’ with inadequate data but heartfelt opinions. Recovery plans for single species or closely related groups focus on a set of unstudied opinions that may well be correct, but to test these ideas in a reliable scientific manner would take years. Triage on a large scale is practiced without discussing the issue, and money is thrown at problems based on the publicity generated. Populations of threatened species continue to decline in what can only be described as failed management. Blame is spread in all directions to developers or farmers or foresters or chemical companies. I do not think these are the signs of a good science which above all ought to work from the strength of evidence and prepare recovery plans based on empirical science.

Part of the problem I think lies in the modern need to ‘do something’, ‘do anything’ to show that you care about a particular problem. ‘We have now no time for slow-moving conventional science, we need immediate results now’. Fortunately, many ecologists are critical of these undesirable trends in our science and carry on (e.g. Amos et al. 2013). You will not likely read tweets about these people or read about them in your daily newspapers. Evidence-based science is rarely quick, and complaints like those that I give here are not new (Sutherland et al. 2004, Likens 2010, Nichols 2012).  

Amos, J.N., Balasubramaniam, S., Grootendorst, L. et al. (2013). Little evidence that condition, stress indicators, sex ratio, or homozygosity are related to landscape or habitat attributes in declining woodland birds. Journal of Avian Biology 44, 45-54. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-048X.2012.05746.x

Likens, G.E. (2010). The role of science in decision making: does evidence-based science drive environmental policy? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 8, e1-e9. doi: 10.1890/090132

Nichols, J.D. (2012). Evidence, models, conservation programs and limits to management. Animal Conservation 15, 331-333. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-1795.2012.00574.x

Sutherland, W.J., Pullin, A.S., Dolman, P.M., Knight, T.M. (2004). The need for evidence-based conservation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19, 305-308. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2004.03.018

Ecology as a Contingent Science

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The Northern Hemisphere is working through a summer of very warm weather, often temperatures 10ºC above ‘normal’. Climate change should in these conditions be obvious to all. Yet despite these clear changes, all the governments of developed countries – including Canada, USA, Australia, Britain – are doing next to nothing about the causes of climate change. This bald statement will lead to a lot of noise about “all we are now doing…”, a carbon tax promoted loudly but that is so low it can have little effect on emissions, and endless talk in the media about “sustainable practices” that are far from sustainable. Why should this be? There are many reasons and I want to discuss just one that pertains to the science of ecology.

Imagine that you are a physicist or chemist and are studying a physical or chemical problem in a lab in Germany and one in Canada. You would expect to get exactly the same experimental results in the two labs. The laws of chemistry and physics are universal and there would be consternation if results differed by geographical locations. Now transform this thought experiment to ecology. You might expect the converse for ecological experiments in the field, and there is much discussion of why this occurs (Brudvig et al. 2017, Marino et al. 2018, Zhou and Ning 2017). We need to think more about why this should be.

First, we might suspect that the ecological conditions are variable by place. The soils of Germany or France or New York or Vietnam differ in composition. The flora and fauna vary dramatically by site even within the same country. The impacts of human activities such as agriculture on the landscape vary by area. Climates are regional as well as local. Dispersal of seeds is not a uniform process. All these things ecologists know a great deal about, and they provide a rich source of post-hoc explanations for any differences. But the flip side is that ecology does not then produce general laws or principles except very general ones that provide guidance but not predictive models useful for management.

This thought leads me back to the general feeling that ecology is not categorized as a hard science and is thus often ignored. Ecologist have been pointing out many of the consequences of climate change for at least 30-40 years with few people in business or local political power listening. This could simply be a consequence of the public caring about the present but not about the future of the Earth. But it might be partly the result of ecology having produced no generality that the public appreciates, except for the most general ecological ‘law’ that “Mother Nature takes care of itself”, so we the public have little to be concerned about.

The paradigm of stability is deeply embedded in most people (Martin et al. 2016), and we are in the process of inventing a non-equilibrium ‘theory’ of ecology in which the outcome of ecological processes leads us into new communities and ecosystems we can only scarcely imagine and certainly not predict clearly. Physicists can predict generally what a future Earth climate with +2ºC or + 4ºC will entail (IPCC 2013, Lean 2018), but we cannot do this so readily with our ecological knowledge.

Where does this get us? Ecology is not appreciated as a science, and thus in the broad sense not funded properly. Ecologists fight over crumbs of funding even to monitor the changes that are occurring, and schemes that might alleviate some of the major effects of climate change are not tested because they are expensive and long-term. Ecology is a long-term science in a world that is increasingly short-term in thinking and in action. Perhaps this will change but no politician wants to wait 10-20 years to see if some experimental procedure works. Funding that is visionary is stopped after 4 years by politicians who know nothing about the problems of the Earth and sustainability. We should demand a politics of sustainability for our future and that of following generations. Thinking long-term should be a requirement not an option.

Brudvig, L.A., Barak, R.S., Bauer, J.T., Caughlin, T.T., and Laughlin, D.C. (2017). Interpreting variation to advance predictive restoration science. Journal of Applied Ecology 54, 1018-1027. doi: 10.1111/1365-2664.12938.

Chapman, M., LaValle, A., Furey, G., and Chan, K.M.A. (2017). Sustainability beyond city limits: can “greener” beef lighten a city’s Ecological Footprint? Sustainability Science 12, 597-610. doi: 10.1007/s11625-017-0423-7.

IPCC (2013) ‘IPCC Fifth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.’ (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K.) http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_ALL_FINAL.pdf

Lean, J.L. (2018). Observation-based detection and attribution of 21st century climate change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Climate Change 9, e511. doi: 10.1002/wcc.511.

Marino, N.A.C., Romero, G.Q., and Farjalla, V.F. 2018. Geographical and experimental contexts modulate the effect of warming on top-down control: a meta-analysis. Ecology Letters 21, 455-466. doi: 10.1111/ele.12913.

Martin, J-L., Maris, V., and Simberloff, D.S. (2016). The need to respect nature and its limits challenges society and conservation science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, 6105-6112. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1525003113.

Zhou, J. and Ning, D. (2017). Stochastic community assembly: Does it matter in microbial ecology? Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 81, e00002-00017. doi: 10.1128/MMBR.00002-17.