98th ESA Annual Meeting (August 4 -- 9, 2013)

August 03 - 09, 2013

SYMP 17

There and Back Again: Replication Standards in Long-Term Research, Integrating the Field and Database Perspectives for Future Management

Replication of empirical results and reproduction of causal processes is a fundamental feature of all of the sciences, including ecology. The theme of the 2013 annual meeting, “Sustainable pathways: learning from the past and shaping the future” reflects the importance of both replicating past studies and expanding them so that future work builds on prior results. At the same time, studying biological systems is contingent on the time at (or over) which they are conducted and their specific spatial locations. Our ability to accurately replicate past ecological surveys or experiments and derive general conclusions from their results depends on our ability to explicate and control the gaps in the histories of localities, methods, and provenance of both data and metadata. It is, therefore, a central challenge for all biologists and bioinformatics researchers to present clear standards of replication. This symposium brings together field researchers and ecoinformaticians to present new ideas and methods for replicating ecological studies in the broadest sense. In particular, we are interested in how we can best aggregate and compare data that originated from multiple localities, span a range of spatiotemporal scales, were collected with a diversity of collection methods, including remote sensing, historical re-surveys, and long-term experiments, and represent a variety of research cultures (e.g., LTER sites, NEON domains, research museums, eco-informatics, and history of science). Speakers will focus on how to use these combined datasets to generate predictions that can be used for future conservation and management. Proposed speakers – established scientists alongside promising students and research follows – will serve as the nucleus for a new multidisciplinary and multi-institutional project aimed at exploring, explicating, and unifying the various practical meanings of ‘replication’ in long-term ecological research.