Observation and Ecology Broadening the Scope of Science to Understan
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 directi
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Dealing with Too Many Observations, and Too Few
In the last chapter we showed that a greater openness to the observations of nonscientists is unveiling valuable new data sources and even accidental ecological knowledge. In this chapter we focus on the more formalized types of observational data that ecologists have been taking for well over a century in the form of museum collections, historical data, long-term monitoring schemes, and more recently, networks of ecological observers. How ecologists plan to collect these data, how the collections or observations are maintained and stored over long time periods, and how they are analyzed all ultimately affect the strength of the conclusions we can draw from them. Ecologists have always used unmanipulated observations, and some classic ecological texts from decades ago, such as Jared Diamond and Ted Case’s Community Ecology (1986) and Jim Brown’s Macroecology (1995), highlight the value of large observational data sets. What is different now is that the sheer volume of observational data, the diversity of its sources, and its variability in availability and quality is unprecedented. Sometimes, as is the case within genetics and genomics, we are literally creating more data than can be stored, even on electronic media (Pollack 2011). At other times this situation leads, frustratingly, to a lot of simply useless data just lying around or accumulating on hard drives. And sometimes we uncover good sources of data, but there just aren’t enough of them. We’re facing a R. Sagarin and A. Pauchard, Observation and Ecology: Broadening the Scope of Science to Understand a Complex World, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-230-3_6, © 2012 Rafe Sagarin and Aníbal Pauchard
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OB SERVAT ION AND EC OLOGY
modern paradox, which is that even as we are flooded by some data, there are still many regions of the world and many ecological questions that are debilitatingly data-poor. Solving this paradox will mean addressing four issues: (1) identifying useful data that can be efficiently extracted from a much larger matrix of ecological observations; (2) finding ways to fill in gaps in historical, modern, and future data-collection efforts; (3) connecting observers and observations in order to achieve a global understanding of ecological phenomena; and (4) capitalizing on the myriad ways— old and new—of analyzing these data in order to put the data flood to beneficial use. The payoff from filtering through these data and cleverly layering multiple methods of data analysis is a remarkable array of studies that stretch the scope of ecology, giving us deeper insight into long-standing questions and new views of the changing world.
Identifying Useful Data within a Flood of Data Data can be collected in a multitude of ways for every specific question in ecology. Put a bunch of ecologists in one room with a question and ask them to come up with a list of data types that would be relevant to answering the question, and in a few hours you will have more ideas about what data is important to collect that yo
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