There is a growing dialectic underfoot in our discipline. While today’s ecologists are being asked to tackle problems of increasingly larger spatial and temporal scales, demanding new technologies and advanced computation, we are simultaneously loosing the skills that form the foundation of our filed. We no longer train students in the art of observation, note taking, sketching and the chronicling of milestones and vagaries that occur along our path of scientific inquiry. We contend that to successfully understand and effectively management ecosystems, we need to know how systems work and that the most fundamental and pressing questions in both pure and applied contemporary ecology are anchored in natural history. Here, we use three empirical examples to illuminate the importance of natural history in ecology and conservation.
Results/Conclusions
Prehistoric clam gardens on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada provide evidence that precontact coastal First Nations used their ecological wisdom of marine ecosystem dynamics to actively manage bivalve production to ensure enhanced and sustained harvests. In south central Alaska, only by integrating contemporary quantitative ecology with traditional knowledge of coastal food webs could researchers identify the ultimate causes of sequential shellfish declines and design relevant conservation measures. In the northern Sea of Cortez, comparing geochemistry embedded in fish otoliths harvested over 5,000 years ago to those caught today, has revealed the magnitude of change that has occurred in the marine ecosystem from damming, diverting and over-allocating the Colorado River. Underpinning each of these examples is the critical need for natural history information. It is our intuitive sense of a system, gained from first-hand experience, from which creative thought and scientific insights spring forth. Prof. Ramon Margalef once wrote that Naturalists are closer to poets than to engineers. Here, we argue that while advanced techniques should be taught, the skills of a poet are equally worth training.
