Category Archives: Charley Krebs’ blogs

Our World View and Conservation

Leave a reply

Recent events have large implications for conservation science. Behind these events – Covid, climate change, wars – lies a fundamental dichotomy of views about humanity’s place in the world today. At the most basic level there are those who view humans as the end-all-and-be-all of importance so that the remainder of the environment and all other species are far down the list of importance when it comes to decision making. The other view is that humans are the custodians of the Earth and all its ecosystems, so that humans are an important part of our policy decisions but not the only part or even the most important part. Between these extreme views there is not a normal distribution but a strongly bimodal one. We see this very clearly with respect to the climate emergency. If you explain the greenhouse dilemma to anyone, you can see the first reaction is that this does not apply to me, so I can do whatever I want versus the reaction of others that I should do something to reduce this problem now. It is the me-here-and-now view of our lives in contrast to the concern we should have about future generations.

Our hope lies in the expectation that things are improving, strongly in young people, more slowly in older people, and negligibly in our politicians. We must achieve sustainability professed by the Greta Thunberg’s of the world, and yet recognize that the action needed is promised by our policy makers only for 2050 or 2100. There is hope that the captains of industry will move toward sustainability goals, but this will be achieved only by rising public and economic pressure. We are beset by wars that make achieving any sustainability goals more difficult. In Western countries blessed with superabundant wealth we can be easily blinded by promises of the future like electricity from nuclear fusion at little cost, or carbon-capture to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. If things get impossibly bad, we are told we can all go to Mars. Or at least the selected elite can.

Conservation gets lost in this current world, and pleas to set aside 30% or 40% of the Earth for biosphere conservation are rarely even heard about on the evening news. The requests for funds for conservation projects are continually cut when there are more important goals for economic growth. Even research funding through our first-class universities and government laboratories is falling, and I would wager without the data that less than 20% of funding for basic research goes to investigating environmental problems or conservation priorities. In my province in Canada a large section of this year’s budget labelled “Addressing Climate Change” is to be spent on repairing the highways from last year’s floods and trying to restore the large areas affected by fires in the previous dry summer.  

What is the solution to this rather depressing situation? Two things must happen soon. First, we the public must hold the government to account for sustainability. Funding oil companies, building pipelines, building highways through Class A farmland, and waging wars will not bring us closer to having a sustainable earth for our grandchildren. Second, we must encourage private industries and wealthy philanthropists to invest in sustainability research. Conservation cannot ever be achieved without setting aside large, protected areas. The list of species that are in decline around the Earth is growing, yet for the vast number of these we have no clear idea why they are declining or what can be done about it. We need funding for science and action, both in short supply in the world today. And some wisdom thrown in.   

On Rewilding and Conservation

4 Replies

Rewilding is the latest rage in conservation biology, and it is useful to have a discussion of how it might work and what might go wrong. I am reminded of a comment made many years ago by Buzz Holling at UBC in which he said, “do not take any action that cannot be undone”. The examples are classic – do not introduce rabbits to Australia if you can not reverse the process, do not introduce weasels and stoats to New Zealand if you cannot remove them later if they become pests, do not introduce cheatgrass to western USA grasslands and allow it to become an extremely invasive species. There are too many examples that you can find for every country on Earth. But now we approach the converse problem of re-introducing animals and plants that have gone extinct back into their original geographic range, the original notion of rewilding (Schulte to Bühne et al. 2022).

The first question could be to determine what ‘rewilding’ means, since it is a concept used in so many ways. As a general concept it can be thought of as repairing the Earth from the ravages imposed by humans over the last thousands of years. It appeals to our general belief that things were better in the ‘good old days’ with respect to conservation, and that all we have seen are losses of iconic species and the introduction of pests to new locations. But we need to approach rewilding with the principle that “the devil is in the details”, and the problems are triply difficult because they must engage support from ecologists over the science and the public over policies that affect different social groups like farmers and hunters. Rewilding may range from initiatives that range from “full rewilding” to ‘minimal rewilding’ (Pedersen et al. 2020). Rewilding has been focused to a large extent on large-bodied animals and particularly those species of herbivores and predators that are high in the food chain, typified by the reintroduction of wood bison back into the Yukon after they went extinct about 800 years ago (Boonstra et al. 2018). So the first problem is that the term “rewilding” can mean many different things.

Two major issues must be considered by conservation ecologists before a rewilding project is initiated. First, there should be a comprehensive understanding of the food web of the ecosystem that is to be changed. This is a non-trivial matter in that our understanding of the food webs of what we describe as our best-known ecosystems are woefully incomplete. At best we can do a boxes and arrows diagram without understanding the strength of the connections and the essential nature of many of the known linkages. The second major issue is how rewilding will deal with climate change (Bakker and Svenning, 2018). There is now an extensive literature on paleoecology, particularly in Europe and North America. The changes in climate and species distributions that flowed from the retreat of the glaciers some 10,000 years ago are documented as a reminder to all ecologists that ecosystems and communities are not permanent in time. Rewilding at the present has a time frame with less than necessary thought to future changes in climate. We make the gigantic assumption that we can recreate an ecosystem that existed sometime in the past, and without being very specific about how we might measure success or failure in restoring ecological integrity. 

Pedersen et al. (2020) recognize 5 levels of rewilding of which the simplest is called “minimal rewilding” and the measure of success at this level is the “Potential of animal species to advance self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems” which I suggest to you is an impossible task to achieve in any feasible time frame less than 50-100 years, which is exactly the time scale the IPCC suggests for maximum climatic emergencies. We do not know what a ‘biodiverse ecosystem’ is since we do not know the boundaries of ecosystems under climate change, and we cannot measure what “natural population dynamics” is because we have so few long-term studies. Finally, at the best level for rewilding we cannot measure “natural species interaction networks” without much arm waving.

Where does this leave the empirical conservation ecologist (Hayward et al. 2019)? Rewilding appears to be more a public relations science than an empirical one. Conservation issues are immediate, and a full effort is needed to protect species and diagnose conservation problems of the day. Goshawks are declining in a large part of the boreal forest of North America, and no one knows exactly why. Caribou are a conservation issue of the first order in Canada, and they continue to decline despite good ecological understanding of the causes. The remedy of some conservation dilemmas like the caribou are clear, but the political and economic forces deny their implementation. As conservation biologists we are ever limited by public and governmental policies that favour exploitation of the land and jobs and money as the only things that matter. Simple rewilding on a small scale may be useful, but the losses we face are a whole Earth issue, and we need to address these more with traditional conservation actions and an increase in research to find out why many elements in our natural communities are declining with little or no understanding of the cause.

Bakker, E.S. and Svenning, J.-C. (2018). Trophic rewilding: impact on ecosystems under global change. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B 373, 20170432. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0432.

Boonstra, R., et al. (2018). Impact of rewilding, species introductions and climate change on the structure and function of the Yukon boreal forest ecosystem. Integrative Zoology 13, 123-138. doi: 10.1111/1749-4877.12288.

Hayward, M.W., et al. (2019). Reintroducing rewilding to restoration – Rejecting the search for novelty. Biological Conservation 233, 255-259. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2019.03.011.

Pedersen, P.B.M., Ejrnæs, R., Sandel, B., and Svenning, J.-C. (2020). Trophic rewilding advancement in Anthropogenically Impacted Landscapes (TRAAIL): A framework to link conventional conservation management and rewilding. Ambio 49, 231-244. doi: 10.1007/s13280-019-01192-z.

Schulte to Bühne, H., Pettorelli, N., and Hoffmann, M. (2022). The policy consequences of defining rewilding. Ambio 51, 93-102. doi: 10.1007/s13280-021-01560-8.

On Administration and Scientific Progress

Leave a reply

After talking and listening to my colleagues and friends who are still employed, I have the urge to try to quantify the utility of administrative meetings to scientific progress. I begin with a very simple model of what this relationship might look like.

The Neutral Model suggests that scientific progress is independent from the number of meetings that are focused on the scientific problem at hand. This is most likely the preferred model of administrators. The Optimistic Model suggests that scientific progress is positively related to the number of administrative meetings, possibly because the coordination among the members of the scientific team is enhanced. The Pessimistic Model suggests that the reverse is true, and if you as a scientific director wish to slow the progress of your scientific team, you should schedule many meetings all the time, presumably with a long agenda.

It is far from clear which model is appropriate for an ecological scientific team and more research is needed on this topic. Many scientists struggling with measurements and data collection are possibly attracted to the Pessimistic Model because time is the limiting element in their lives and both data and results are what limit progress. On the other hand, scientific administrators are possibly drawn to the Optimistic Model if they believe that meetings are the most important point of scientific progress and time is not the limiting factor, or perhaps they are drawn to the Neutral Model if they assume their scientists will work diligently and achieve the same goals no matter how many meetings are scheduled.

I hesitate to present this model given that the underlying mathematics are relatively simple, plus there are probably more business textbooks that make a detailed analysis of this issue than there are words in this blog. In a more realistic framework, we may have a peaked curve that indicate many meetings early in a project and fewer meetings once things are moving forward smoothly. There is going to be no magic numbers here, and the only purpose of this brief discussion is to think about how much you need to meet to define and deliver a set of objectives for a scientific question.

All my speculations above arose from an old paper (Moss 1978) illustrating these same general principles. Parkinson (1958) framed the law that “Work Expands To Fill The Time Available For Its Completion” and showed one consequence of this was that the fraction of administrators within a public organisation tends to increase irrespective of the amount of external scientific work done by that organisation. Moss (1978) produced these data to illustrate this law for British science data from 1976-77, illustrated in this graph:

Moss (1980) further elaborated on how Parkinson’s Law applied to scientific research organizations and noted that it may apply to many other research organizations. Although it is an old ‘law’ it may still be worth some discussion and consideration today.

Moss, R. (1978). An empirical test of Parkinson’s Law. Nature 273, 184. doi: 10.1038/273184a0.

Moss, R. (1980). Expanding on Parkinson’s Law. Nature 285, 9. doi: 10.1038/285009a0.

On How Genomics will not solve Ecological Problems

Leave a reply

I am responding to this statement in an article in the Conversation by Anne Murgai on April 19, 2022 (https://phys.org/news/2022-04-african-scientists-genes-species.html#google_vignette) : The opening sentence of her article on genomics encapsulates one of the problems of conservation biology today:

“DNA is the blueprint of life. All the information that an organism needs to survive, reproduce, adapt to environments or survive a disease is in its DNA. That is why genomics is so important.”

If this is literally correct, almost all of ecological science should disappear, and our efforts to analyse changes in geographic distributions, abundance, survival and reproductive rates, competition with other organisms, wildlife diseases, conservation of rare species and all things that we discuss in our ecology journals are epiphenomena, and thus our slow progress in sorting out these ecological issues is solely because we have not yet sequenced all our species to find the answers to everything in their DNA.

This is of course not correct, and the statement quoted above is a great exaggeration. But, if it is believed to be correct, it has some important consequences for scientific funding. I will confine my remarks to the fields of conservation and ecology. The first and most important is that belief in this view of genetic determinism is having large effects on where conservation funding is going. Genomics has been a rising star in biological science for the past 2 decades because of technological advances in sequencing DNA. As such, given a fixed budget, it is taking money away from the more traditional approaches to conservation such as setting up protected areas and understanding the demography of declining populations. Hausdorf (2021) explores these conflicting problems in an excellent review, and he concludes that often more cost-effective methods of conservation should be prioritized over genomic analyses. Examples abound of conservation problems that are immediate and typically underfunded (e.g., Turner et al. 2021, Silva et al, 2021).   

What is the resolution of these issues? I can recommend only that those in charge of dispensing funding for conservation science examine the hypotheses being tested and avoid endless funding for descriptive genomics that claim to have a potential and immediate outcome that will forward the main objectives of conservation. Certainly, some genomic projects will fit into this desirable science category, but many will not, and the money should be directed elsewhere.  

The Genomics Paradigm listed above is used in the literature on medicine and social science, and a good critique of this view from a human perspective is given in a review by Feldman and Riskin (2022). Scientists dealing with human breast cancer or schizophrenia show the partial but limited importance of DNA in determining the cause or onset of these complex conditions (e.g., Hilker et al 2018, Manobharathi et al. 2021). Conservation problems are equally complex, and in the climate emergency have a short time frame for action. I suspect that genomics for all its strengths will have only a minor part to play in the resolution of ecological problems and conservation crises in the coming years.

Feldman, Marcus W. and Riskin, Jessica (2022). Why Biology is not Destiny. The New York Review of Books 69 (April 21, 2022), 43-46.

Hausdorf, Bernhard (2021). A holistic perspective on species conservation. Biological Conservation 264, 109375. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109375.

Hilker, R., Helenius, D., Fagerlund, B., Skytthe, A., Christensen, K., Werge, T.M., Nordentoft, M., and Glenthøj, B. (2018). Heritability of Schizophrenia and Schizophrenia Spectrum based on the Nationwide Danish Twin Register. Biological Psychiatry 83, 492-498. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.08.017.

Manobharathi, V., Kalaiyarasi, D., and Mirunalini, S. (2021). A concise critique on breast cancer: A historical and scientific perspective. Research Journal of Biotechnology 16, 220-230.

Samuel, G. N. and Farsides, B. (2018). Public trust and ‘ethics review’ as a commodity: the case of Genomics England Limited and the UK’s 100,000 genomes project. Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy 21, 159-168. doi: 10.1007/s11019-017-9810-1.

Silva, F., Kalapothakis, E., Silva, L., and Pelicice, F. (2021). The sum of multiple human stressors and weak management as a threat for migratory fish. Biological Conservation 264, 109392. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109392.

Turner, A., Wassens, S., and Heard, G. (2021). Chytrid infection dynamics in frog populations from climatically disparate regions. Biological Conservation 264, 109391. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109391.

More on Old Growth Forests and Conservation

Leave a reply

This is a short blog to alert you to a well written plea for saving old growth forests in British Columbia by Karen Price. Karen works with Dave Daust and Rachel Holt, three of our ecological heroes pushing the provincial government to recognize the value of old growth forests. This problem is world-wide but the scientific data alone will not capture the general public as much as this article might.

https://northernbeat.ca/opinion/old-growth-complexity-in-a-sound-bite/

These ecologists have reported their detailed analysis in a report that you can access through the Sierra Club of BC if you want more information on the struggle here in Canada (https://sierraclub.bc.ca/laststand/ ). At present there is nothing but denial from the government and from the industry that there is a problem – the forestry industry is not overharvesting or if it is, we need the jobs. As one person told me, it is not a problem “because we plant one tree seedling for every thousand-year-old tree that we log”.

So please keep up the pressure on governments around the world. Scientists have pushed a strong agenda on sustainable logging for many years with success now looking possible because ordinary citizens demand a change, understanding that forests are more than wood. We must continue the push for sustainable forestry and old growth forest protection.

Lindenmayer, D.B., Kooyman, R.M., Taylor, C., Ward, M., and Watson, J.E.M. (2020). Recent Australian wildfires made worse by logging and associated forest management. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4, 898-900. doi: 10.1038/s41559-020-1195-5.

Price, Karen, Holt, Rachel F., and Daust, Dave (2021). Conflicting portrayals of remaining old growth: the British Columbia case. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 51, 1-11. doi: 10.1139/cjfr-2020-0453.

On Assumptions in Ecology Papers

1 Reply

What can we do as ecologists to improve the publishing standards of ecology papers? I suggest one simple but bold request. We should require at the end of every published paper a annotated list of the assumptions made in providing the analysis reported in the paper. A tabular format could be devised with columns for the assumption, the perceived support of and tests for the assumption, and references for this support or lack thereof. I can hear the screaming already, so this table could be put in the Supplementary Material which most people do not read. We could add to each paper in the final material where there are statements of who did the writing, who provided the money, and add a reference to this assumptions table in the Supplementary Material or a statement that no assumptions about anything were made to reach these conclusions.

The first response I can detect to this recommendation is that many ecologists will differ in what they state are assumptions to their analysis and conclusions. As an example, in wildlife studies, we commonly make the assumption that an individual animal having a radio collar will behave and survive just like another animal with no collar. In analyses of avian population dynamics, we might commonly assume that our visiting nests does not affect their survival probability. We make many such assumptions about random or non-random sampling. My question then is whether or not there is any value in listing these kinds of assumptions. My response is that this approach of listing what the authors think they are assuming should alert the reviewers to the elephants in the room that have not been listed.

My attention was called to this general issue by the recent paper of Ginzburg and Damuth (2022) in which they contrasted the assumptions of two general theories of functional responses of predators to prey – “prey dependence” versus “ratio dependence”. We have in ecology many such either-or discussions that never seem to end. Consider the long-standing discussion of whether populations can be regulated by factors that are “density dependent” or “density independent”, a much-debated issue that is still with us even though it was incisively analyzed many years ago.  

Experimental ecology is not exempt from assumptions, as outlined in Kimmel et al. (2021) who provide an incisive review of cause and effect in ecological experiments. Pringle and Hutchinson (2020) discuss the failure of assumptions in food web analysis and how these might be resolved with new techniques of analysis. Drake et al. (2021) consider the role of connectivity in arriving at conservation evaluations of patch dynamics, and the importance of demographic contributions to connectivity via dispersal. The key point is that, as ecology progresses, the role of assumptions must be continually questioned in relation to our conclusions about population and community dynamics in relation to conservation and landscape management.

Long ago Peters (1991) wrote an extended critique of how ecology should operate to avoid some of these issues, but his 1991 book is not easily available to students (currently available on Amazon for about $90). To encourage more discussion of these questions from the older to the more current literature, I have copied Peters Chapter 4 to the bottom of my web page at https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~krebs/books.html for students to download if they wish to discuss these issues in more detail.

Perhaps a possible message in all this has been that ecology has always wished to be “physics-in-miniature” with grand generalizations like the laws we teach in the physical sciences. Over the last 60 years the battle in the ecology literature has been between this model of physics and the view that every population and community differ, and everything is continuing to change under the climate emergency so that we can have little general theory in ecology. There are certainly many current generalizations, but they are relatively useless for a transition from the general to the particular for the development of a predictive science. The consequence is that we now bounce from individual study to individual study, typically starting from different assumptions, with very limited predictability that is empirically testable. And the central issue for ecological science is how can we move from the present fragmentation in our knowledge to a more unified science. Perhaps starting to examine the assumptions of our current publications would be a start in this direction.  

Drake, J., Lambin, X., and Sutherland, C. (2021). The value of considering demographic contributions to connectivity: a review. Ecography 44, 1-18. doi: 10.1111/ecog.05552.

Ginzburg, L.R. and Damuth, J. (2022). The Issue Isn’t Which Model of Consumer Interference Is Right, but Which One Is Least Wrong. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 10, 860542. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2022.860542.

Kimmel, K., Dee, L.E., Avolio, M.L., and Ferraro, P.J. (2021). Causal assumptions and causal inference in ecological experiments. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 36, 1141-1152. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2021.08.008.

Peters, R.H. (1991) ‘A Critique for Ecology.’ (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England.) ISBN:0521400171 (Chapter 4 pdf available at https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~krebs/books.html)

Pringle, R.M. and Hutchinson, M.C. (2020). Resolving Food-Web Structure. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 51, 55-80. doi: 10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110218-024908.

On Research Grant Funding

Leave a reply

All ecologists except for Charles Darwin have had to apply for funding to carry out their research. I am mainly familiar with how this is done in Canada and the United States, with a little experience in Australia. So, depending on where you live, these comments may or may not apply. I would expect the European Union, the United States, and Britain to have the best funding processes since they lead the developed world in research funding. But I stand to be corrected in all this discussion and in my evaluations which are largely focussed on ecological research.

Ecological research is funded largely from government funding and paid for by the taxpayer. There is relatively little private funding available for ecology and this could be because few think ecological science matters to the world, or because private funding goes mainly to medical research. Government funding is pulled in many diverse directions, as anyone who follows the news knows. Governments devoted to exponential growth are wary of ecological work because it does not usually contribute to GDP and ecologists are very wary of exponential growth. But changes in public expectations can influence how governments view environmental work. The continued concern about climate change and a growing interest in biodiversity in general is pushing governments ever so slowly in the direction of environmental science.

But despite this apparent positive trend we are going backwards. The fraction of money going into environmental work is going down once you correct for inflation. The funding of universities is also going down with more student debt so that as the population grows and more jobs in environmental work ought to occur, it is not happening. This situation is most apparent in funding universities for research and for training research students. The amount of money per capita is falling and this leads to two problems in research funding. The first is that governments in general have adopted what I call the “Oxford and Cambridge Paradigm” of research funding. This paradigm in its simple form argues that all the important and innovative research comes from Oxford and Cambridge, or the equivalent universities in your country, and so most of the government research funding must go to these places. But the minor research players in the smaller universities cannot be ignored so they are given a pittance to do some research to keep them quiet. The same strategy can be applied to the funding of graduate students and research assistants. A simple result is that this works well in part but produces clear cases of amazing researchers in a minor university being underfunded while a mediocre researcher at “Oxford” is rolling in money. One consequence of this general pattern is that the major universities reach out and hire the amazing researchers from the smaller universities at a high salary and substantial amounts of funding, so the pattern tends to stabilize rather than evolve into a better system.

The second problem is that competition increases if funding per capita is falling, so that excellent young scientists cannot be employed in their chosen field. The politicians will argue that young people should choose profitable areas in which to study, and perhaps university advisors should tell budding ecologists to go to business schools. Competition rarely leads to useful outcomes in human society, despite the economic gospels we are inundated with. Competition in research can lead to useful liaisons of many scientists working on the same problem, but this happens less frequently than seems desirable. The Holy Grail for competition is the Nobel Prize which goes to one or two scientists in a field despite the common knowledge that they achieved their goals with the help of dozens to hundreds of colleagues.

This problem has not gone unnoticed of course but few provide formal analysis of the details of funding and how funding is dispersed (Aagaard et al. 2020, Scholten et al. 2021). Murray et al. (2016) showed at least for Canada smaller universities were being research funded less well per capita than larger ones, and both Ferreira et al (2016) and De Peuter and Conix (2021) have discussed peer reviews as a major problem in the current funding situation. The problem of bias in review panels is well recognized. If the main objective is to fund excellence, the problem has become more difficult because of social considerations of sexism and racism added to the demand for excellence. This is a minefield I do not wish to enter here.

The existing situation cries out for answers as to how funding decisions are made at both lower and higher levels. In particular as a Canadian example, we might ask why fundamental science total funding in the Canadian Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) has not changed since 2007 (https://can-acn.org/science-funding-in-canada-statistics/). The average research grant in Canada in the NSERC Ecology and Evolution Panel was $39K in 2016 and $37K in 2021. Lest we ecologists feel persecuted, in the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funding for basic biomedical research has not changed since 2006. The trends in these numbers are important because someone at the higher levels of making decisions on funding basic science at least in Canada has decided that basic science is not “important”, so that even though we are moving into catastrophic global predictions from climate change and biodiversity loss, basic science funding does not increase in real dollars. I am not sure whether other countries have a similar issue, but the same problem can be seen in many governments in decisions about funding for the basic sciences.

The bottom line is that there are continuing important issues in funding basic science, from biases at the committee level in evaluating individual research grants all the way to the much larger issue of who at the top of the decision pile allocates funds for national and local scientific priorities. If scientific research is about excellence, we have much left to do to achieve appropriate funding in Canada and elsewhere.

Aagaard, K., Kladakis, A., and Nielsen, M.W. (2020). Concentration or dispersal of research funding? Quantitative Science Studies 1, 117-149. doi: 10.1162/qss_a_00002.

De Peuter, S. and Conix, S. (2021). The modified lottery: Formalizing the intrinsic randomness of research funding. Accountability in Research 1-22. doi: 10.1080/08989621.2021.1927727

Ferreira, C. et al. (2016). The evolution of peer review as a basis for scientific publication: directional selection towards a robust discipline? Biological Reviews 91, 597-610. doi: 10.1111/brv.12185

Murray, D.L., Morris, D., Lavoie, C., Leavitt, P.R., and MacIsaac, H. (2016). Bias in research grant evaluation has dire consequences for small universities. PLoS ONE 11, e0155876. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0155876.

On Replication in Ecology

Leave a reply

All statistics books recommend replication in scientific studies. I suggest that this recommendation has been carried to extreme in current ecological studies. In approximately 50% of ecological papers I read in our best journals (a biased sample to be sure) the results of the study are not new and have been replicated many times in the past, often in papers not cited in ‘new’ papers. There is no harm in this happening, but it does not lead to progress in our understanding of populations, communities or ecosystems or lead to new ecological theory. We do need replication examining the major ideas in ecology, and this is good. On the other hand, we do not need more and more studies of what we might call ecological truths. An analogy would be to test in 2022 the Flat Earth Hypothesis to examine its predictions. It is time to move on.

There is an extensive literature on hypothesis testing which can be crudely summarized by “Observations of X” which can be explained by hypothesis A, B, or C each of which have unique predictions associated with them. A series of experiments are carried out to test these predictions and the most strongly supported hypothesis, call it B*, is accepted as current knowledge. Explanation B* is useful scientifically only if it leads to a new set of predictions D, E, and F which are then tested. This chain of explanation is never simple. There can be much disagreement which may mean sharpening the hypotheses following from Explanation B*. At the same time there will be some scientists who despite all the accumulated data still accept the Flat Earth Hypothesis. If you think this is nonsense, you have not been reading the news about the Covid epidemic.

Further complications arise from two streams of thought. The first is that the way forward is via simple mathematical models to represent the system. There is much literature on modelling in ecology which is most useful when it is based on good field data, but for too many ecological problems the model is believed more than the data, and the assumptions of the models are not stated or tested. If you think that models lead directly to progress, examine again the Covid modelling situation in the past 2 years. The second stream of thought that complicates ecological science is that of descriptive ecology. Many of the papers in the current literature describe a current set of data or events with no hypothesis in mind. The major offenders are the biodiversity scientists and the ‘measure everything’ scientists. The basis of this approach seems to be that all our data will be of major use in 50, 100 or whatever years, so we must collect major archives of ecological data. Biodiversity is the bandwagon of the present time, and it is a most useful endeavour to classify and categorise species. As such it leads to much natural history that is interesting and important for many non-scientists. And almost everyone would agree that we should protect biodiversity. But while biodiversity studies are a necessary background to ecological studies, they do not lead to progress in the scientific understanding of the ecosphere.

Conservation biology is closely associated with biodiversity science, but it suffers even more from the problems outlined above. Conservation is important for everyone, but the current cascade of papers in conservation biology are too often of little use. We do not need opinion pieces; we need clear thinking and concrete data to solve conservation issues. This is not easy since once a species is endangered there are typically too few of them to study properly. And like the rest of ecological science, funding is so poor that reliable data cannot be achieved, and we are left with more unvalidated indices or opinions on species changes. Climate change puts an enormous kink in any conservation recommendations, but on the other hand serves as a panchrestron, a universal explanation for every possible change that occurs in ecosystems and thus can be used to justify every research agenda, good or poor with spurious correlations.

We could advance our ecological understanding more rapidly by demanding a coherent theoretical framework for all proposed programs of research. Grace (2019) argues that plant ecology has made much progress during the last 80 years, in contrast to the less positive overview of Peters (1991) or my observations outlined above. Prosser (2020) provides a critique for microbial ecology that echoes what Peters argued in 1991. All these divergences of opinion would be worthy of a graduate seminar discussion.

If you think all my observations are nonsense, then you should read the perceptive book by Peters (1991) written 30 years ago on the state of ecological science as well as the insightful evaluation of this book by Grace (2019) and the excellent overview of these questions in Currie (2019).  I suggest that many of the issues Peters (1991) raised are with us in 2022, and his general conclusion that ecology is a weak science rather than a strong one still stands. We should celebrate the increases in ecological understanding that have been achieved, but we could advance the science more rapidly by demanding more rigor in what we publish.

Currie, D.J. (2019). Where Newton might have taken ecology. Global Ecology and Biogeography 28, 18-27. doi: 10.1111/geb.12842.

Grace, John (2019). Has ecology grown up? Plant Ecology & Diversity 12, 387-405. doi: 10.1080/17550874.2019.1638464.

Peters, R.H. (1991) ‘A Critique for Ecology.’ (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England.). 366 pages. ISBN: 0521400171

Prosser, J.I. (2020). Putting science back into microbial ecology: a question of approach. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Biological sciences 375, 20190240. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0240.

On Feeding Birds and Other Wildlife

2 Replies

There is a very large global movement to feed birds and I want to address why this is a human success story and could be an ecological disaster. These two alternatives follow from two divergent views of the role of humans in the world’s ecosystems. The first is the dominant view that humans are the most important species on Earth, and that we can design the world to maximize our wellbeing without concern of the ecological consequences. The second is a view that we are the custodians of the Earth and that our aim must be to conserve the Earth’s biodiversity and protect its ecosystems. The second view is gaining more visibility with the conservation movement, but if it is to become dominant, there are many ecological problems that deserve our attention. One of the most obvious ones is bird feeding. There are at present no global policies on feeding birds and views on feeding are controversial (Baverstock et al. 2019).

Humans feed birds because they like to look at them and because they have a general belief that feeding in winter or severe weather prevents bird deaths (Brock et al. 2021, Clark et al. 2019). If that is correct, we would expect to see that if we had one large area where birds were fed in winter, and another in which birds were not fed, there should be a difference in population size in the two areas in the following spring. I have yet to see any study that shows this differential effect. Consider an alternative hypothesis that feeding does indeed improve bird survival in winter, but this merely feeds more predators that now have a larger prey base, so the improvement is largely in the predator populations.  It is certainly true for some migratory bird species that if they are fed they can overwinter in more northerly areas or in cities and towns, so geographic winter ranges can expand.

Perhaps the most obvious impact of feeding birds and providing water is the transmission of diseases associated with feeding stations and bird baths. Lawson et al. (2017) explored this problem with bird feeding in Great Britain and found emerging diseases over a 25-year period, focusing on protozoan, viral, and bacterial diseases with contrasting modes of transmission. They also considered mycotoxin contamination of food residues in bird feeders, which present a direct risk to bird health. Rogers et al. (2018) described a mortality event in a declining population of band-tailed pigeons in California with a loss off about 18,000 pigeons associated with tricomonosis in a drought in which birds visited artificial water sites like bird baths. Purple et al. (2015) have demonstrated that the protozoan parasite Trichomonas gallinae could persist in bird baths.

There is a certain irony in the general belief that feeding improves the survival of wild birds. I am reminded of an old story about the English ornithologist David Lack who in the 1930s was talking to a local bird club about his long-term study for a life table of the English Robin. He reported from his banding studies that the life expectancy of the robin was about one year. After his talk, an elderly woman came up to him and started beating him over the head with her umbrella. Once she calmed down, she challenged him because she had a robin singing in her back yard for the last 10 years, so she assumed it was the same robin.

There are other consequences of feeding birds. One is the attraction of squirrels to bird feeders, and the subsequent displacement of birds. One study in southern England showed that grey squirrels occupied the feeders nearly half of the time they were in service (Hanmer et al. 2018). Another consequence of feeders is feed spilled to the ground which can attract rats and other less desirable species in urban settings. Many of these problems are not unique to bird feeding. Fležar et al. (2019) used cameras to investigate sites where European brown bears were being artificially fed year-round on plant-food and carrion from road kills in Slovenia. Over one year they detected 23 vertebrate species at the feeding sites in about 68,000 photos, most frequently brown bears, red foxes and European badgers, but also about half of the species coming to the feeding sites were birds. Roe deer also used these bear feeding sites, even though it is technically illegal to feed roe deer in this jurisdiction because deer feeding on corn and other plants materials can lead to fatal metabolic diseases. The key point is that feeding stations can attract a variety of non-target species with largely unknown consequences for the local wildlife community.  

It will take a brave set of ecologists and veterinarians to define and test the critical hypotheses that arise from feeding wildlife of any kind if only because of the vested interests of the bird seed producers along with so many humans who ‘know’ that feeding is ‘good’ for wildlife. The irony of all this in the end is that many people in parts of the Earth suffer from poor nutrition and starvation while in the first world we use agricultural products to feed birds and other wildlife.

Baverstock, S., Weston, M.A., and Miller, K.K. (2019). A global paucity of wild bird feeding policy. Science of The Total Environment 653, 105-111. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.10.338.

Brock, M., Doremus, J., and Li, Liqing (2021). Birds of a feather lockdown together: Mutual bird-human benefits during a global pandemic. Ecological Economics 189, 107174. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107174.

Clark, D.N., Jones, D.N., and Reynolds, S.J. (2019). Exploring the motivations for garden bird feeding in south-east England. Ecology and Society 24, 26. doi: 10.5751/ES-10814-240126.

Fležar, Urša, Costa, B., and Krofel, M. (2019). Free food for everyone: artificial feeding of brown bears provides food for many non-target species. European Journal of Wildlife Research 65, 1. doi: 10.1007/s10344-018-1237-3.

Hanmer, H.J., Thomas, R.L., and Fellowes, M.D.E. (2018). Introduced Grey Squirrels subvert supplementary feeding of suburban wild birds. Landscape and Urban Planning 177, 10-18. doi: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.04.004.

Lawson, B., Robinson, R. A., and Cunningham, A. A. (2018). Health hazards to wild birds and risk factors associated with anthropogenic food provisioning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences 373 (1745): 20170091. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0091.

Purple, K.E. and Gerhold, R.W. (2015). Persistence of two isolates of Trichomonas gallinae in simulated bird baths with and without organic material. Avian Diseases 59, 472-474. doi: 10.1637/11089-041115-Reg.1.

Rogers, K.H., Girard, Y.A., Woods, L.W., and Johnson, C.K. (2018). Avian trichomonosis mortality events in band-tailed pigeons (Patagioenas fasciata) in California during winter 2014–2015. International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife 7, 261-267. doi: 10.1016/j.ijppaw.2018.06.006.

On the Canadian Biodiversity Observation Network (CAN BON)

Leave a reply

I have been reading the report of an exploratory workshop from July 2021 on designing a biodiversity monitoring network across Canada to address priority monitoring gaps and engage Indigenous people across Canada. The 34 pages of their workshop report can be accessed here, and I recommend you might read it before reading my comments on the report:

https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/Media-Media/NewsDetail-DetailNouvelles_eng.asp?ID=1310

I have a few comments on this report that are my opinion only. I think the Report on this workshop outlines a plan so grand and misguided that it could not be achieved in this century, even with a military budget. The report is a statement of wisdom put together with platitudes. Why is this and what are the details that I believe to be unachievable?

The major goal of the proposed network is to bring together everyone to improve biodiversity monitoring and address the highest priority gaps to support biodiversity conservation. I think most of the people of Canada would support these objectives, but what does it mean? Let us do a thought experiment. Suppose at this instant in time we knew the distribution and the exact abundance of every species in Canada. What would we know, what could we manage, what good would all these data be except as a list taking up terabytes of data? If we had these data for several years and the numbers or biomass were changing, what could we do? Is all well in our ecosystems or not? What are we trying to maximize when we have no idea of the mechanisms of change? Contrast these concerns about biodiversity with the energy and resources applied in medicine to the mortality of humans infected with Covid viruses in the last 3 years. A monumental effort to examine the mechanisms of infection and ways of preventing illness, with a clear goal and clear measures of progress toward that goal.

There is no difficulty in putting out “dream” reports, and biologists as well as physicists and astronomers, and social scientists have been doing this for years. But in my opinion this report is a dream too far and I give you a few reasons why.

First, we have no clear definition of biodiversity except that it includes everything living, so if we are going to monitor biodiversity what exactly should we do? For some of us monitoring caribou and wolves would be a sufficient program, or whales in the arctic, or plant species in peat bogs. So, to begin with we have to say what operationally we would define as the biodiversity we wish to monitor. We could put all our energy into a single group of species like birds and claim that these are the signal species to monitor for ecosystem integrity. Or should we consider only the COSEWIC list of Threatened or Endangered Species in Canada as our major monitoring concern? So, the first job of CAN BON must be to make a list of what the observation network is supposed to observe (Lindenmayer 2018). There is absolutely no agreement on that simple question within Canada now, and without it we cannot move forward to make an effective network.

The second issue that I take with the existing report is that the emphasis is on observations, and then the question is what problems will be solved by observation alone. The advance of ecological science has been based on observation and experiment directed to specific questions either of ecological interest or of economic interest. In the Pacific salmon fishery for example the objective of observation is to predict escapement and thus allowable harvest quotas. Despite years of high-quality observations and experiments, we are still a long way from understanding the ecosystem dynamics that drive Pacific salmon reproduction and survival.

Contrast the salmon problem with the caribou problem. We have a reasonably good understanding of why caribou populations are declining or not, based on many studies of predator-prey dynamics, harvesting, and habitat management. At present the southern populations of caribou are disappearing because of a loss of habitat because of land use for forestry and mining, and the interacting nexus of factors is well understood. What we do not do as a society is put these ideas into practice for conservation; for example, forestry must have priority over land use for economic reasons and the caribou populations at risk suffer. Once ecological knowledge is well defined, it does not lead automatically to action that biodiversity scientists would like. Climate change is the elephant in the room for many of our ecological problems but it is simultaneously easy to blame and yet uneven in its effects.

The third problem is funding, and this overwhelms the objectives of the Network. Ecological funding in general in Canada is a disgrace, yet we achieve much with little money. If this ever changes it will require major public input and changed governmental objectives, neither is under our immediate control. One way to press this objective forward is to produce a list of the most serious biodiversity problems facing Canada now along with suggestions for their resolution. There is no simple way to develop this list. A by-product of the current funding system in Canada is the shelling out of peanuts in funding to a wide range of investigators whose main job becomes how to jockey for the limited funds by overpromising results. Coordination is rare partly because funding is low. So (for example) I can work only on the tree ecology of the boreal forest because I am not able to expand my studies to include the shrubs, the ground vegetation, the herbivores, and the insect pests, not to mention the moose and the caribou.  

For these reasons and many more that could be addressed from the CAN BON report, I would suggest that to proceed further here is a plan:

  1. Make a list of the 10 or 15 most important questions for biodiversity science in Canada. This alone would be a major achievement.
  2. Establish subgroups organized around each of these questions who can then self-organize to discuss plans for observations and experiments designed to answer the question. Vague objectives are not sufficient. An established measure of progress is essential.
  3. Request a realistic budget and a time frame for achieving these goals from each group.  Find out what the physicists, astronomers, and medical programs deem to be suitable budgets for achieving their goals.
  4. Organize a second CAN BON conference of a small number of scientists to discuss these specific proposals. Any subgroup can participate at this level, but some decisions must be made for the overall objectives of biodiversity conservation in Canada.

These general ideas are not particularly new (Likens 1989, Lindenmayer et al. 2018). They have evolved from the setting up of the LTER Program in the USA (Hobbie 2003), and they are standard operating procedures for astronomers who need to come together with big ideas asking for big money. None of this will be easy to achieve for biodiversity conservation because it requires the wisdom of Solomon and the determination of Vladimir Putin.

Hobbie, J.E., Carpenter, S.R., Grimm, N.B., Gosz, J.R., and Seastedt, T.R. (2003). The US Long Term Ecological Research Program. BioScience 53, 21-32. doi: 10.1016/j.oneear.2021.12.008

Likens, G. E. (Ed.) (1989). ‘Long-term Studies in Ecology: Approaches and Alternatives.’ (Springer Verlag: New York.) ISBN: 0387967435

Lindenmayer, D. (2018). Why is long-term ecological research and monitoring so hard to do? (And what can be done about it). Australian Zoologist 39, 576-580. doi: 10.7882/az.2017.018.

Lindenmayer, D.B., Likens, G.E., and Franklin, J.F. (2018). Earth Observation Networks (EONs): Finding the Right Balance. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, 1-3. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.10.008.