Ecological laws for agroecological design: the need for more organized collaboration in producing, evaluating and updati
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Ecological laws for agroecological design: the need for more organized collaboration in producing, evaluating and updating ecological generalizations Oswaldo Forey1 · Stefan Linquist2
Received: 29 July 2019 / Accepted: 25 August 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The applied discipline of agroecological design provides a useful case study for examining broader philosophical questions about the existence and importance of ecological generalizations or “laws.” Recent developments in the availability and use of formal meta-analyses have led to the discovery of many resilient generalizations in ecology (Linquist et al. 2016). However, these “laws” face numerous challenges when it comes to their practical application. Concerns about their reliability and scope might stem from unclear logical and epistemic connections to more foundational or “unifying” generalizations (Lean in Philos Top 47(1), 2019) which, in ecology, tend to be derived from first principles and in association with highly abstract models. This raises questions about the nature of those foundational generalizations themselves. In particular, how resilient are they compared to the generalizations uncovered by empirically driven methods? Here we propose a procedure for evaluating the resilience of generalizations across five ecologically relevant dimensions. This procedure was applied to seven well known foundational generalizations in ecology. Surprisingly, it turned out to be impossible to estimate the resilience of these foundational generalizations based on the available literature. This points to the need for a more centralized repository of information about ecological generalizations, created with the explicit aim of evaluating such important dimensions as causal mechanism and predictive power.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/ s40656-020-00336-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Oswaldo Forey [email protected] 1
INRAE, UERI Gotheron, Saint‑Marcel‑lès‑Valence, Auvergne‑Rhône‑Alpes, France
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Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
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O. Forey, S. Linquist
Keywords Philosophy of ecology · Ecological laws · Ecological principles · Generalization in ecology · Agroecological design
1 Introduction Agroecology can be viewed as a movement, as a set of practices, and as a scientific discipline (Wezel et al. 2009). Yet, agroecology is above all concerned with the design and re-design of farming systems through the application of ecological principles (Francis et al. 2003). More specifically, agroecological design is the process of organizing the components of an agroecosystem in ways that promote the functioning of certain biotic and abiotic processes (e.g. biogeochemical cycles, trophic webs, etc.) in order to generate ecosystem services for human needs. Agroecology is, therefore, a design-oriented branch of ecology. It aims to do more than
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