Observation and Ecology

Broadening the Scope of Science to Understand a Complex World

Rafe Sagarin, Aníbal Pauchard

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781597268264, 9781597268257
• eBook ISBN: 9781610912303
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The need to understand and address large-scale environmental problems that are difficult to study in controlled environments—issues ranging from climate change to overfishing to invasive species—is driving the field of ecology in new and important directions. Observation and Ecology documents that transformation, exploring how scientists and researchers are expanding their methodological toolbox to incorporate an array of new and reexamined observational approaches—from traditional ecological knowledge to animal-borne sensors to genomic and remote-sensing technologies—to track, study, and understand current environmental problems and their implications.
 
The authors paint a clear picture of what observational approaches to ecology are and where they fit in the context of ecological science. They consider the full range of observational abilities we have available to us and explore the challenges and practical difficulties of using a primarily observational approach to achieve scientific understanding. They also show how observations can be a bridge from ecological science to education, environmental policy, and resource management. 

Observations in ecology can play a key role in understanding our changing planet and the consequences of human activities on ecological processes. This book will serve as an important resource for future scientists and conservation leaders who are seeking a more holistic and applicable approach to ecological science.

PART I

THE ROLE OF OBSERVATION IN ECOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Ecology has always been a science based on observing the natural world, so what has changed that we should now draw our attention to the act of observation within a scientific context? In a word, everything. Making sense of just how profound are the changes to our environment and our way of studying the environment requires putting ecology into its historical context. The opening part of this book looks at ecology’s ancient roots in natural history, its more modern manifestations as a rigorous science that has become well established in academic institutions, and its current trajectory toward becoming a multidisciplinary science, one that is more fully integrated with societal activities and concerns.

In Chapter 1, we lay out the premise that ecology has always been an adaptable science and argue that while a primarily experimental ecology has served us well in the twentieth century, present conditions are pushing ecology to adapt to a new niche where broad observations are an increasingly important means, sometimes the only means, of making sense of a complex world. In Chapter 2 we dig a little deeper into the history of observations in ecology, to trace the evolution of ecology and to lay out why observations are now more prominent and more powerful than ever before.

CHAPTER 1

An Observational Approach to Ecology

To understand how ecology will serve us in this era age of rapid environmental change, we need to understand that ecology is not a static discipline. It is continuously adapting to the changing world that ecologists find themselves living and working within. This chapter is about the most recent adaptation in ecology, which can be seen in both an increased use and increased diversity of observational approaches to understanding ecological phenomena. This adaptation, like stepwise adaptations in nature, hasn’t created an entirely new and unrecognizable entity, but rather has grown recursively from the past state of ecology. Accordingly, we first discuss what ecology was for much of its existence and then we explore how the urgency of environmental change and the opportunity to study that change in unprecedented ways is providing a pathway for adaptation of the science of ecology.

Ecology as an Experimental Science

One of the prominent characteristics of the ecology since the mid-twentieth century has been the importance of experimental methods. This itself was an evolution from previous ecological methods. During this time, ecology left behind its exploratory stage and progressed through stepwise advances by means of cleverly designed and carefully controlled planned experiments at relatively small scales in order to isolate the mechanisms underlying various ecological phenomena. This is an attractive way to do science. By setting up experiments that tweak just a small number of variables and strict controls, one can often determine with some certainty that a particular causal factor leads to a particular ecological change. For example, an experiment to look at the effects of predation would be set up by erecting barriers around a plot to keep predators out, and the control would be plots where predators roam freely, and there may also be controls on the experimental equipment such as partial barriers that let predators in while allowing the researcher to determine whether the experimental equipment itself might have affected outcomes through shading or the disturbance of installing the equipment.

The manipulative experimental approach is also amenable to replication, provided there is enough space to place multiple copies of the experimental and control plots. This gives a researcher confidence that she can test a hypothesis—that is, a testable supposition, such as, “diversity of species in this grassland is maintained by herbivory on species x, which would otherwise overgrow all the other species”—about an ecological phenomenon. If the system is amenable to experimental treatment, a good experimental ecologist will probably be able to conceive of not just one, but multiple alternative hypotheses to test. Testing multiple alternative hypotheses that could be serially rejected was the aspiration of John Platt’s hugely influential “Strong Inference” (Platt 1964) approach to ecology. In the early 1960s, Platt argued that ecology as a science would forever remain a second-tier endeavor relative to apparently nobler scientific pursuits like chemistry, physics, and molecular biology, until it got its act together and developed a more rigorous framework.

It is easy to see why this experimental approach has been so widely adopted by ecologists. With a manipulative experiment, you know you are going to get a result, or you know the steps you need to take to get a result. Well, at least you are more likely than not to get a result—in reality many experiments go awry because of unexpected forces of nature (maybe strong El Niño storms that rip all your experimental plots off the intertidal rocks where the plots were painstakingly installed). And while experimental work is rarely easy—our colleagues have spent countless hours scuba diving in frigid Alaskan waters, trekking up South Pacific highlands in 99 percent humidity, and mucking about in malarial swamps to deploy, check, repair, and reap data from their experimental setups—it is fairly tractable. That is, it is very likely that someone could conceive of, plan, deploy, analyze, and write about a good experiment within the duration of an extended field course or a graduate-school career. And most important, these features make experimental work inherently fundable, because the experiment has a specific purpose, clear methodological stages, and a relatively constrained set of possible outcomes—very little is left to chance. Once the experiment has been conceived, it is fairly straightforward to explain to a funding agency like the National Science Foundation (NSF) that the experiment will perform as promised, that it will deliver a particular set of data, and that it will answer a particular set of ecological questions.

Manipulative experiments and strong inference have long been important in ecology. They have been used to tackle questions across the spectrum of ecological inquiry—from what controls the dynamics of an ecological community, to why does that animal behave in such an odd way, to how does a limpet navigate its way home to the same spot after every high tide? At the same time, it is easy to see why we as ecologists have been forced to expand outward from this niche. Manipulated experiments can only do so much. And it happens that where they fall short is exactly in the place where we now desperately need more ecological understanding. The scale and the dynamics of many observed ecological phenomena have leapt beyond the scales of time and space that are readily controlled in experiments. In particular, the really big environmental problems we face today—global climate change, collapsing biodiversity, ocean acidification, nitrification of huge water bodies, and the widespread emergence of invasive species and new infectious diseases, to name a few—are all very difficult to study by manipulating variables and repeating cleverly designed experiments.

You can certainly put some marine creatures into a beaker of seawater, drop the pH a few points and see if they can still form calcified shells, and that is important knowledge. But it’s going to tell you precious little about the fate of those same creatures spread out across an entire ocean basin that is acidifying due to carbon deposition in some places but not others as the organisms navigate its swirling eddies and trash gyres, experience countless ecological interactions, and evolve with the constantly changing conditions. In other words, both the scale and the dynamics of small laboratory and field experiments often bear little resemblance to what is going on in the larger world. And then, even if we could get the funding and could work out the logistics of experimentally testing and controlling for all these complex dynamics at the scales at which they work, would it be ethical to do so? It doesn’t seem to make sense, if we are worried about the potentially catastrophic effects of large-scale environmental change like ocean acidification, to replicate these changes on a grand experimental scale.

There is also an urgency to the environmental problems we are facing that places an enormous burden on ecological studies. In order to be truly useful for both identifying and potentially solving these problems, we need information quickly (as in now), we need it to tell us about what is going on across large spatial scales, and we need it to tell us something about the relationship between the human social and nonhuman ecological components at the heart of the problem. These things are way outside the niche of typical experimental ecological studies.

Adapting to Change

But even as ecology is outgrowing its niche, it is already adapting to deal with these difficulties. What does this adaptation in ecology look like? We argue in this book that it is based in observational approaches and that it may look like a return to the old ways of ecology, but it is also a lot more than that. For example, there is a strong element of good old-fashioned natural history—the ancient human practice of observing and recording the diversity and changes of nature (as Tom Fleischner helps illuminate for us in Box 1.1)—in the new observational approaches we are seeing. There are, in fact, many concepts of what “natural history” is (Attenborough 2007; Fleischner 2005; Arnold 2003; Dayton and Sala 2001; Apple-gate 1999; Bartholomew 1997), and undoubtedly there will be times in this book where our ideas converge almost fully with one of them, and there will be times where we diverge quite far from the usual definitions of natural history. Our concept of observational approaches to ecology is both more and less than natural history. It is more than natural history because it incorporates remote observations, like those from satellite mapping and cameras strapped to whales, that are far removed from the human experience of nature usually associated with natural history (although some bold thinkers like Carlos Martinez del Rio argue that modern natural historians should fully embrace these technologies as part of their practice, see Chapter 4). Ecology is also less than natural history because we are, as much as possible, limiting our discussion to the scientific practice of ecology, whereas natural history, although potentially scientific, also widely embraces writing and poetry and art and philosophy. (See naturalhistorynetwork.org for examples of the broad scope of natural history.)

The observational approaches to ecology we discuss in this book also reflect a return to earlier ecological inquiries because they are often integrative of the social component of ecological systems, both in the types of data they are using and the types of questions they are addressing. Early ecologists were naturalists who took painstaking observations of natural systems and attempted to piece those observations together into a more holistic understanding of the world. Many were devoted to the idea that by understanding ecological systems we could gain understanding of human social systems. They were also surprisingly interdisciplinary without ever invoking that awkward word. Working after the horrors of the First World War and in the growing shadow of the Second, they were intensely interested in what studies of the relationships of organisms in nature had to say about conflict and cooperation among humans. Warder Allee, for example, felt that unexpected benefits came from cooperation among animals and that similar emergent benefits could accrue to human societies that modeled themselves after animal communities (Allee 1951, 1943). One of his students, the marine ecologist Edward Ricketts, noted that “the laws of animals must be the laws of men” and further refined his thinking through fruitful collaborations with writers like John Steinbeck and philosophers such as the mythologist Joseph Campbell (Rodger 2006; Tamm 2004).

BOX 1.1

Natural History: The Taproot of Ecology

THOMAS L. FLEISCHNER

A dozen college students lean into the steep hillside above the snout of the enormous valley glacier. For the moment, though, they pay no heed to the massive muscle of ice—their attention is focused, laser-like, on the enchanting internal structures within tubular corollas. The world suddenly takes on new depth and beauty as these details emerge as tiny, significant patterns.

Groups of curious urbanites—in bright clothing and rubber boots—wade into the mountain stream with dip nets, squealing with surprise and delight as wriggly invertebrates emerge from the black ooze.

A young Charles Darwin comes ashore on equatorial islands, midway through a five-year voyage, and carefully observes, then records, the lengths and shapes of the bills of the small birds he finds.

At a predetermined moment, small clusters of biologists begin identifying and counting shorebirds on the expansive mudflats, trying to learn how important this mangrove estuary is to the lives of these intercontinental migrants.

Each of these encounters is an example of the oldest continuous human endeavor—natural history, the practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world. Barry Lopez noted that natural history “is as old as the interaction of people with landscape.” Simply put, there have never been people without natural history. Every hunting-gathering culture throughout the history of our species practiced careful, deliberate attentiveness to nature—indeed, survival depended on it. Pliny the Elder coined the term natural history in the first century AD with the publication of his encyclopedic Historia Naturalis—literally, “the story of nature.”

Natural history—careful description based on direct observation—provides the empirical foundation for biology, geology, anthropology, and ecology. The first textbook in ecology, Charles Elton’s Animal Ecology (1927), began: “Ecology is a new name for a very old subject. It simply means scientific natural history.” Most theoretical breakthroughs in ecology have come from thinkers accomplished in field natural history. Witness Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who were both committed naturalists, and E. O. Wilson, who titled his autobiography Naturalist. However, academic science in the twentieth century placed abstract theorizing on a pedestal, and devalued the basic descriptive science on which all abstract models are based. The bottom line: without accurate empirical observations, theory is just so much fluff. And, as Harry Greene has pointed out, new natural history information about organisms continually resets research agendas—helping scientists ask better questions and refine theories.

Conservation, too, has always depended directly on natural history. How can we save species from extinction if we don’t know where they are, when they’re there, and what they’re doing? Moreover, for many of us who do field ecology, I suspect, our commitment to conservation has been deepened as much by our direct personal encounters with the world’s brilliant wildness as by the data we’ve collected.

Aldo Leopold frequently deplored the loss of traditional natural history study. In 1938, he delivered an address entitled “Natural History—the Forgotten Science,” in which he criticized the new wave of science that increasingly took things apart but failed to explain how they were connected. Leopold objected to the way science forsook natural history when, as he saw it, society needed it most.

Society still needs natural history. Ecology grounded in the best natural history is more dependable, and less vulnerable to political meddling, than science floating on a sea of abstractions. Sustainable resource management depends on natural history insight. And natural history can inoculate society with gratitude for the uplifting beauty of the world, and with the humility this engenders.

Likewise, ecological science today is increasingly cognizant of the social implications of ecological systems. Some fields within ecology, such as conservation biology, are already well along this path. But observational methods are cropping up all over ecological inquiry and also spreading ecology far out into other realms of inquiry. One of Rafe’s more unusual projects, for example, is working with an interdisciplinary group of ecologists, anthropologists, psychologists, public health experts, and counterterrorism experts, as well as soldiers, cops, firemen, and spies, to figure out what we can learn from 3.5 billion years of biological evolution for security questions in modern human society (Sagarin 2012; Sagarin et al. 2010; Sagarin 2010). Although some people have called this “Natural Security” project a “new” approach to security questions, it is essentially doing exactly what Allee and Ricketts and many other early ecologists were doing decades ago—taking their observed knowledge about how natural organisms solve environmental problems and connecting it to unsolved societal problems.

But there is also a big difference between what ecologists are doing now and what those long-gone renaissance men and women were doing, and it has to do with the different opportunities available to today’s ecologists, arising from new technologies and advances in old technologies that allow us to observe ecological systems in wholly unprecedented ways. Thanks to remote sensing, genomic screening, and animal-borne sensors, to name a few technical marvels, we can now conduct ecology at the very smallest levels of biological organization—at the level of gene-environment interactions—and also at the vary largest levels by observing whole regions of the planet at once. We are even breaking past the boundaries of planet Earth and considering extraterrestrial ecological questions such as, what are the conditions available to support life on Mars?

Rediscovering natural history. Embracing the social sciences. Looking beyond academia for knowledge. Using humans as the focal points of ecological studies and animals as the observers. Adopting technologies once reserved for the CIA and NASA and biotech corporations. All these relatively recent additions to an ecologist’s repertoire are collectively stretching and pushing the science into all sorts of new directions. Besides their common roots as essentially observational methods for looking at ecological relationships, is there a way to characterize how these newly acquired tools are affecting ecological science?

The Domains of Observation-Based Ecology

One way to organize all these different ways of using observations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About Island Press
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Role of Observation in Ecological Science
• Part II Using Observations in Ecology
• Part III The Challenges Posed by an Observational Approach
• Part IV Beyond Academia: The Power of Observational Approaches
• References
• About the Authors
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Island Press | Board of Directors