Biodiversity in the Age of Ecological Indicators
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School of Forest Resources and Penn State Institutes of Environment, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA. E-mail: [email protected] 2 Center for Statistical Ecology and Environmental Statistics, Department of Statistics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Received and accepted in final form 24 October 2005
ABSTRACT The multifarious nature of biodiversity is considered in relation to difficulties of definite determination and managerial mandates for monitoring. At a micro scale there is some convergence with the concept of community, but the linkage is largely lost in the spectra of temporal scope, spatial scales, successional seres, and taxonomic trajectories. Practicality points to selecting suitable suites of indicators as surrogates for particular purposes. Domains of partial ordering on multiple indicators constitute comparable collectives, whereas different domains require recognition of special situations. Theoretical treatise and practical process can proceed in parallel, with dialogue and cross-fertilization serving to invigorate and inspire; whereas compulsive concern for completeness and consistency can be counter-productive as well as unduly expensive. Inability to completely capture all aspects of biodiversity in one full formulation is interesting and integral to issues of biocomplexity.
Key Words: biodiversity, diversity, multiple indicators, scales, natural community, partial order
1. INTRODUCTION We offer here a perspective commentary on a perspective commentary by Carlo Ricotta entitled “Through the Jungle of Biological Diversity”, in which he seems to argue that biodiversity is so multi-faceted that it essentially lacks meaning as a subject for measurement and expression with the suggestion that quantitative ecology would be equally well served (or disserved) by confining attention to characterization of ‘community’. This is an interesting and somewhat anachronistic intellectual exercise in the contemporary era of ecological work that might be termed an age of ecological indicators, wherein there has arisen a journal called Ecological Indicators and multi-million dollar projects to develop targeted indicators of ecological characteristics are finding sponsorship in public funding. Meanwhile, no complementary concern is raised about the inherent indefiniteness and duality of interpretation surrounding ‘community’ in ecology, which is advocated as the conceptual backstop for biodiversity. We first reexamine the issue of indefiniteness in terms of complexity, constructs, components, spatial and temporal scope/scale, specification, comparison and complements. We then proceed to consider ways of coping with complexity and confounding Acta Biotheoretica (2006) 54: 119–123 DOI: 10.1007/s10441-006-8256-2
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Springer 2006
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W. MYERS AND G.P. PATIL
that embrace multiple indicators rather than agonizing over choices and conflicts. Finally, we contemplate enlarging the orders of indicators to encompass some interactions in
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