Why is ecology so hard?
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| Papers (9) | Insight |
|---|---|
| It is still a young and occasionally flaky field that perhaps in ecology has so far been more productive at generating interesting think pieces and metaphors than deep insights into how biological communities actually behave. | |
| The bulk of evolutionary ecology implicitly assumes that ecology shapes evolution, rather than vice versa, but there is increasing interest in the possibility of a two-way interaction. | |
| It can be argued that biophysical ecology (i. e., the science concerned with studying the subject matter of ecology from the physical-mathematical point of view) is developing rather slowly. | |
| The “new ecology” underscores the role of nonequilibrium conditions in biophysical environments, a reorientation of biological ecology based in part on biogeography. | |
| Most of these traits are hard to measure, but advances in comparative ecology have suggested a number of easy to measure analogs. | |
| These difficulties are not insuperable, however, as is readily demonstrated by the applications of the “new ecology” in landscape ecology and agroecology. | |
34 Citations | Through a dialectical analysis of alternative paradigms in ecology, it is argued that BEC's holistic, developmental view of terrestrial ecosystems is fundamentally compatible with complexity theory and provides the information content missing from contemporary ecosystem ecology. |
20 Citations | Our central finding is that generalizations in community ecology are just as prevalent and as resilient as those in population or ecosystem ecology. |
| The identification of these properties provides a framework for bridging the theoretical and methodological divide between biological ecology and human ecology. |
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