The need for a new kind of ecology

In her article published in nature last week, Georgina Mace - president of the British Ecological Society and professor at and director of the Centre for Biodiversity and Ecosystems here at UCL – argues that a fresh approach to ecology is needed if we are going to tackle the global environmental challenges that the world faces today. She says that climate change and the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services demand a new kind ecology, a kind that focuses on how whole communities interact with people and the physical environment at the landscape level. 

Advances in ecology in the past century have hugely improved our understanding of species interactions, population dynamics, food-web dynamics and how organisms adapt to their local environments. For example, Schmitz and Barton (2013) reported that climate change might alter abiotic conditions such as temperature and precipitation, which in turn could alter the life-cycle timing of predator and prey species and the nature of their interactions. However, there are few general theories for how multiple species respond to factors such as disease or changing climate at the community level and Georgina Mace considers this to be a major problem for global-change science.

In the article, Georgina talks specifically about the need to integrate ecological processes into models simulating Earth systems. In their current state, Earth systems models are unable to account for ecological processes such as feedbacks and thresholds due to a lack of long-term ecological studies. This limits the validity of such models considerably and so impairs our understanding of how biodiversity will respond to climate change in the future. Drew Purves and colleagues argue that analogous general ecosystem models (GEMs) could radically improve our understanding of the biosphere and could inform policy decisions about biodiversity and conservation. Considering how valuable and effective general circulation models have been in improving understanding of how the climate system works, to me it seems absolutely essential that analogous GEMs are developed. 

Finally, Georgina emphasises the need for data sharing and collaboration, and a greater focus on meta-analyses and synthesis. These approaches are fundamental for the identification of general trends, such as the effect of temperature change on animal dispersal. Innovations in citizen-science such as the monitoring of ash-dieback in Europe may be the key to unlocking this new kind of ecology. In my next post I want to explore and review the role that citizen-science is playing in scientific research and really get to grips with this latest trend!