Observation and ecology: Expanding the scope of science to understand a complex world

Background/Question/Methods

This talk summarizes the major arguments and findings from our book “Observation and Ecology: Expanding the Scope of Science to Understand a Complex World” which focuses on the evolving nature of ecological science.  We suggest that observations of systems that weren’t manipulated for scientific purposes are becoming once again a prominent tool for achieving ecological understanding.  What sets this new era of observation apart from the work of early naturalists and ecologists is the rapid integration of a wide range of observational technologies—from genetics to remote sensing—as well as the much wider inclusion of non-scientists, including citizen observers and local and traditional knowledge holders, in ecological studies. Our book explores this changing face of ecology from a pragmatic as well as philosophical perspective.  Numerous opportunities and challenges arise in collecting and analyzing observational data sets, which were often created with no scientific purpose in mind.  This in turn raises fundamental questions about what science is and how it is best conducted.

Results/Conclusions

Our work arose initially as a critique of what we saw as a bias toward experimental manipulation and theoretical approaches to ecology by journal editors and funding agencies.  We first envisioned the book as the initiation of a discussion of what should rightly be considered ecological science. As we began to research the role of observation-based studies in ecology, however, we discovered that dramatic changes are already occurring in ecological science and the book became more of a documentation of these changes with discussion of their implications.  The re-emergence of observational approaches can be seen quantitatively, in the increased percentage of published observation-based studies in three leading ecology journals between 1990 and 2010.  It can also be seen qualitatively in the growing use of observation-based approaches, especially by graduate students, whose contributions cannot yet be quantified in the overall “phenotype” of ecological science.  We show numerous examples of observation-based studies that have provided key advancements in basic to applied ecological science.  These studies make a strong case that the standard critiques of observational approaches--that correlation does not imply causation; that process cannot be inferred from patterns; and that observational approaches are generally “fishing expeditions”—are inaccurate and outdated.  We argue that by moving beyond these often reflexive critiques, ecology can become a fully integrated science that finds the best ways—whether experimental, theoretical, or observational—to provide timely answers to complex social-ecological challenges.