The Ecology of Place: Contributions of Place-Based Research to Ecological Understanding

by Ian Billick, Mary V. Price

Overview

Ecologists can spend a lifetime researching a small patch of the earth, studying the interactions between organisms and the environment, and exploring the roles those interactions play in determining distribution, abundance, and evolutionary change. With so few ecologists and so many systems to study, generalizations are essential. But how do you extrapolate knowledge about a well-studied area and apply it elsewhere?

Through a range of original essays written by eminent ecologists and naturalists, The Ecology of Place explores how place-focused research yields exportable general knowledge as well as practical local knowledge, and how society can facilitate ecological understanding by investing in field sites, place-centered databases, interdisciplinary collaborations, and field-oriented education programs that emphasize natural history. This unique patchwork of case-study narratives, philosophical musings, and historical analyses is tied together with commentaries from editors Ian Billick and Mary Price that develop and synthesize common threads. The result is a unique volume rich with all-too-rare insights into how science is actually done, as told by scientists themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226050430
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/15/2011
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ian Billick is executive director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Crested Butte, Colorado. Mary V. Price is professor emerita of biology at the University of California, Riverside.

Read an Excerpt

THE ECOLOGY OF PLACE

CONTRIBUTIONS OF PLACE-BASED RESEARCH TO ECOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2010 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-05042-3

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Chapter One

The Ecology of Place

Mary V. Price and Ian Billick

The Challenge of Diversity, Complexity, and Contingency

Any attempt to understand the ecological and evolutionary sciences must take into account the remarkable biological diversity of planet earth. Some 1.7 million individual species have been described to date. Although this may seem like a large number, the true species diversity is much larger. From the rates at which undescribed species are discovered, biologists estimate that between 4 and 100 million species share our planet (Penniski 2003). This number, however, does not begin to describe the true extent of biological diversity. Each species is genetically and phenotypically heterogeneous, with numerous recognizably distinct subgroups-variously called subspecies, races, or varieties. Even within seemingly homogenous subspecific units, local populations and individuals differ from one another. Simply cataloging this diversity is difficult enough. Ecologists and evolutionary biologists have taken on the additional challenges of understanding the interactions between all these organisms and the environments they inhabit, and the roles those interactions play in determining distribution, abundance, and evolutionary change.

Ecological interactions are complex as well as diverse, and their outcomes are contingent upon context. The phenotypic characters that vary among species, subspecies, and individuals influence how organisms respond to the many abiotic features of their environments that can influence their well-being, such as light intensity, temperature, moisture, substrate texture or chemistry, and fluid properties of air or water. Organisms also are embedded in a web of interactions with other species in a local community. This makes ecological systems particularly complex because species interactions can be mediated through indirect as well as direct linkages in the community, and through feedbacks with the physical environment. Hence, even the pairwise interaction between two species is not constant, but instead is contingent on their abundances, which are dynamic, as well as on biological and physical environmental contexts that vary spatially and temporally on multiple scales (Holzapfel and Mahall 1999, Thompson 2001, Sanford et al. 2003).

Diversity and contingency present enormous challenges to understanding the ecological systems of the planet because there are simply too few ecologists to study them all. By browsing websites in the global list of scientific ecological societies provided by the British Ecological Society (2007), we estimate that there are some 25,000 members of ecological societies worldwide. Even if that figure underestimates the number of field-oriented research scientists by an order of magnitude (which we doubt), this army is far too small to tackle each of the planet's ecosystems, much less to understand their dynamics and how they are interconnected. To be sure, we may be able to mobilize many more of the planet's six billion people in the quest for ecological understanding, as is discussed in chapters 12 and 18. This strategy has merit, particularly for knowing how to manage local systems, but it will not completely solve the problem.

We need, in addition, some way of efficiently extracting "portable ecological knowledge" (Cooper 2003) from a small sample of systems. This latter problem is one that every ecologist and evolutionary biologist confronts: How can we develop a general understanding of ecological systems when we know that the results of a field study typically depend on a host of factors unique to the focal system as well as on the particular location and time of the study? Are there generalizations-broadly applicable statements-to be had? If so, what is their nature, and how best can we identify them given all that diversity and contingency? The reverse inferential direction is equally problematic: Can ecological or evolutionary generalizations be applied in useful ways to individual systems?

Stung by a perception that theirs is a slow-moving field populated by "incompetent scientists working on impossible problems" (to quote an anonymous reviewer; also see Peters 1991, Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1993), ecologists have debated these questions, often vigorously, ever since ecology emerged as a "self-conscious" discipline in the early part of the twentieth century (McIntosh 1985, Cooper 2003, Kingsland 2005). Some, dodging the "competence" and "tractability" possibilities, have attributed the apparent lack of progress to weaknesses of method: there is too much natural history; there is too little natural history; we need more experiments; we should be looking for patterns; we should be studying mechanisms; we should be integrating; we should be using strong inference (sensu Platt 1964) and rigorous hypothesis-testing; we do too much hypothesis-testing and not enough model-fitting; there is too much theory; there is too little theory, or theory of the wrong sort (e.g., May 1981, Pielou 1981, Colwell 1984, Salt 1984, Kingsland 1985, Bartholomew 1986, Peters 1991, Allen and Hoekstra 1992, Schrader-Frechette and McCoy 1993, Pickett et al. 1994, Brown 1995, Weiner 1995, Hilborn and Mangel 1997, Resetarits and Bernardo 1998, Belovsky et al. 2004, Simberloff 2004). Meanwhile, historians and philosophers of science have started to take an interest in the history and conceptual structure of ecology and related fields. Biographies of influential ecologists (Tobey 1981, Meine 1988, Crowcroft 1991, Slobodkin and Slack 1999, Newton 2006, Goodstein 2007) and treatments of the historical development of major concepts, traditions, schools, controversies, and subfields (Jackson 1981, Mayr 1982, Kingsland 1985, 2005, McIntosh 1985 and 1987, Crowcroft 1991, Golley 1993) have appeared at an increasing rate. Philosophers of science-and philosophically inclined scientists-are turning their attention to the issues of contingency, historicity, uniqueness, and complexity that characterize ecology and evolutionary biology, and have begun to explore their implications for such things as the structure of scientific concepts and generalizations, the nature of scientific inquiry, the relative importance of explanation vs. prediction, or the relationships between theoretical and empirical traditions in these fields (e.g., Ayala and Dobzhansky 1974; Hull 1974; Medawar 1974; Mayr 1982; Schoener 1986; Gasper 1991; Pickett et al. 1994; Cooper 2003; Mitchell 2003, 2009). Such philosophical analysis suggests that the process of scientific inquiry in ecology and evolutionary biology and the way in which ecological knowledge is used to solve applied problems may differ in fundamental ways from the heretofore dominant paradigms that have been drawn from the physical sciences (Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1993, Cooper 2003).

Meeting the Challenge

Lack of perfect consensus concerning how their science should be done has hardly deterred ecologists and evolutionary biologists from going about their business of searching for generalizations. What basic strategies do they use?

An obvious approach involves comparison. Comparison underpins the "macroecological" search for broad patterns (Brown 1995), such as the species-area relationship of island biogeography, the decrease in species diversity with latitude, or the scaling of physiological functions with body size. Comparison is the foundation for assessments of the overall frequency of occurrence, the strength of various ecological processes such as density-dependent population growth, or the relative contributions of competition, predation, disturbance, and climate to the species composition of communities. Comparison also is fundamental to detecting broad temporal trends, such as changes in biodiversity or climate, and to deriving estimates of biogeochemical fluxes on large spatial scales. Statements about frequencies of occurrence and estimates of variables or trends represent one sort of generalization. They arise primarily from replication of observations, experiments, or measurements across taxa, space, and time.

Another approach involves the development and testing of general theory-broadly applicable, testable propositions. Theory is diverse. It can involve the quantitative description of predictive empirical patterns uncovered by the comparative approach, or the elaboration of logical consequences of empirically or deductively generated premises. It can be analytical, deriving consequences of premises through well-defined mathematical algorithms, or computational, deriving consequences through brute-force computer simulation of mechanistic processes. It can involve an entirely verbal and qualitative statement of relationships among entities. Successful theory-that which provides valid prediction or explanation of empirical phenomena-is the stuff of generalization.

Not all ecologists adopt a broad macroecological type of comparative approach or a broad theoretical perspective. Many focus instead on forging a deep understanding of particular organisms and places. This focus on the particular is expected of "applied" ecologists, whose principal goal is to understand how to manage or restore a single system. However, it is also common among "basic" ecologists, whose goal is to generalize, as is indicated by how they publish. They choose general ecological and evolutionary journals as opposed to journals that specialize on particular taxonomic groups or environments, they describe essential features of their systems in terms understandable to colleagues unfamiliar with them, they set their studies in general conceptual frameworks, and they discuss how their data lead to conclusions about those frameworks. Although the information generated by focused studies can contribute to generalizations by providing data points in comparative studies or tests of general theory, the primary goal of the focused studies of "basic" ecologists is instead to evaluate how well theoretical conceptual frameworks account for the properties of individual systems. The generalization in this case involves a statement about the applicability of alternative conceptual frameworks to a particular system with particular properties.

We use the term "ecology of place" for this third research approach, because that approach pursues general understanding through the sort of detailed understanding of a particular place-the "sense of place"-that has come to be associated with ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold. In our usage, "place" does not equal "point in space," nor does it mean "field site." Spatial ecology (e.g., Kareiva 1994, Tilman 1994) focuses on how the spatial location of a point affects its properties via ecological exchanges with neighboring points. "Field site" is the location for a study, often chosen for reasons other than its intrinsic ecological properties (see Krebs, chapter 13). What distinguishes these spatial notions from our notion of "place" is that in the latter, the particular ecological features of the point in space are central. We reserve "place" to represent all of those idiosyncratic ecological features-including spatial location and time period-that define the ecological context of a field study; and "ecology of place" or "place-based research" for research that assigns the idiosyncrasies of place, time, and taxon a central and creative role in its design and interpretation, rather than as a problem to be circumvented through replication or statistical control.

Elements of the Ecology of Place

Place-based approaches in ecology and evolutionary biology share many elements with modern "case study" research designs used in the social sciences (e.g., Platt 1992, Yin 1994; see box 1.1), perhaps because these fields are confronted with similar challenges. Both ecology and the social sciences study complex entities whose current state is the product of individual properties, history, and setting.

As described by Yin (1994) and Platt (1992), case studies in the social sciences focus in depth on phenomena in their real-world context; rely on non-random selection of one or a few cases whose unique characteristics facilitate meeting research goals; use multiple types and sources of information about each case to answer the research question; evaluate theory by whether it can be successfully modified to fit rich patterns in data associated with one or a few cases rather than on a simple falsification criterion; use a logic of analytical rather than statistical generalization-that is, they predict how a phenomenon is manifested in particular cases, rather than summarize frequency of occurrence across cases; and they require multiple-investigator teams to carry out a multifaceted research design.

Place-based ecological studies are conducted almost exclusively with intact systems in a natural field context, although they may be supplemented with focused study of isolated components of the system in laboratory or field microcosms. They often are long-term, involving many years of sampling to collect information about system dynamics, or a sustained effort to evaluate theory in multiple cycles of theory development and evaluation. Shifts in the direction of research are common. Study systems are generally chosen to follow up on prior observations, or because they represent a particular class of systems or are particularly tractable for answering a question of interest. Typically, ecology of place takes advantage of diverse types of information-natural history anecdote, knowledge of a site's history, observation of the system and its environmental context, data on responses to experimental treatments or natural perturbation, and comparison with similar systems. These data are used to modify general theory so that it yields expectations about a particular system, and they are also used to evaluate those expectations. The unique product of place-based research is an evolving model that accounts for observed properties and behavior of the system, and that also allows predictions about the applicability of the general theory to new systems with similar or different properties. Place-based ecological research is carried out by loose, often interdisciplinary consortia of collaborators who bring diverse perspectives and skills and follow different threads of investigation. It also benefits from informal exchange among independent investigators who work at the same site.

Purpose and Overview of the Book

The primary purpose of this book is to initiate discussion of a research approach-what we call the ecology of place-that is implicitly used by many ecologists but has not been formally recognized. Several published volumes have discussed alternative approaches in ecology and evolution, such as the comparative method (Harvey and Pagel 1991), macroecology (Brown 1995, Gaston and Blackburn 2000), or experimental ecology (Resetarits and Bernardo 1998). Discussion of case study approaches in ecology has primarily considered how ecological knowledge from diverse sources can be deployed in a scientifically defensible way to solve specific environmental problems-that is, in what respect case-specific knowledge is portable (National Research Council 1986, Shrader-Frechette and McCoy 1993). To our knowledge, this book is the first to consider how place-based research contributes to basic scientific understanding. We believe a logical starting point is to provide examples of how practitioners of ecology of place approach their science, in the hope of uncovering features that contribute to its success.

Accordingly, we challenged contributors to this volume, many of whom have adopted an approach that incorporates elements of ecology of place at one time or another in their careers, to contemplate three primary issues. First, how does one go about doing place-based research? Second, how does ecology of place extract general insights from the idiosyncrasies of place, and how can these insights be applied to previously unstudied systems? Third, how does the infrastructure of science affect the ability of scientists to do place-based research and gain general understanding from it? The authors have responded enthusiastically with essays that are so rich in ideas that we as editors have been hard pressed to organize them into thematic groups. We settled on the following book structure.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments


1 The Ecology of Place
Mary V. Price and Ian Billick

1 The Imprint of Place on Ecology and Ecologists
Mary V. Price and Ian Billick

2 The Role of Place in the History of Ecology
Sharon Kingsland

3 Leopold’s Legacy: An Ecology of Place
Donald M. Waller and Susan Flader

2 The Idiosyncrasy of Place: Challenges and Opportunities
Ian Billick and Mary V. Price

4 Ecological Invariance and the Search for Generality in Ecology
H. Ronald Pulliam and Nickolas M. Waser

5 Convergence and Divergence in Mediterranean-Climate Ecosystems: What We Can Learn by Comparing Similar Places 
Philip W. Rundel

6 Ecological Insights into the Causes of an Adaptive Radiation from Long-Term Field Studies of Darwin’s Finches
Peter R. Grant and B. Rosemary Grant

7 Individual Fitness, Social Behavior, and Population Dynamics of Yellow-Bellied Marmots 
Kenneth B. Armitage

8 The Aleutian Archipelago: Addressing the Functional Importance of Carnivory through Variation in Space and Time
James A. Estes

3 Building an Understanding of Place
Mary V. Price and Ian Billick

9 Understanding the Role of Predation in Open Systems: The Value of Place-Based Research
Barbara L. Peckarsky, J. David Allan, Angus R. McIntosh, and Brad W. Taylor

10 The Ecology of Place in Oak Forests: Progressive Integration of Pairwise Interactions into Webs 
Richard S. Ostfeld and Clive G. Jones

11 A Sense of Place: Tatoosh 
Robert T. Paine, J. Timothy Wootton, and Catherine A. Pfister

12 The Ecology of Place and Natural Resource Management: Examples from Marine and Terrestrial Ecosystems
Charles G. Curtin

4 The Interaction between Local and General Understanding
Mary V. Price and Ian Billick

13 Case Studies and Ecological Understanding
Charles J. Krebs

14 Responsive Science: The Interplay of Theory, Observation, and Experiment in Long-Term, Place-Based Research
Svata M. Louda and Leon G. Higley

15 To Know a Tropical Forest: What Mechanisms Maintain High Tree Diversity on Barro Colorado Island, Panama? 
Stephen P. Hubbell

5 Building the Capacity for Place-Based Research
Ian Billick and Mary V. Price 

16 The Model Ecosystem as a Paradigm of Place-Based Research: The Intersection of Geology, Ecology, and Economics at the McLaughlin Reserve 
Paul Aigner and Catherine E. Koehler

17 Managing Place-Based Data: The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory as a Case Study
Ian Billick

18 Local People, Scientific Inquiry, and the Ecology and Conservation of Place in Latin America
Peter Feinsinger, Samara Álvarez, Geovana Carreño, Edmundo Rivera, Rosa Leny Cuéllar, Andrew Noss, Félix Daza, Mireiza Figuera, Edith Lanz, Lainet García, Maikel Cañizares, Aylin Alegre, and Alejandra Roldán

19 Concluding Remarks: Taking Advantage of the Power of Place
Mary V. Price and Ian Billick

List of Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

An impressive volume, clearly presented and well integrated to show what has been achieved when ecologists study particular natural environments for long periods. . . . This excellent book is well suited for ecology seminar discussions. Highly recommended.

Choice - F. N. Egerton

The book is an exemplar for anyone wanting to bring together a coherent edited volume that is more than the sum of the parts. . . . [T]his excellent book offers a superb collection of reflective essays on the virtues of field-based ecology and scientific natural history. But it when you get fed up poring over journals devoid of the practical challenges and essential joy of being an ecologist.

Bulletin of the British Ecological Society

The Ecology of Place is an important and novel contribution to the literature that will stimulate much discussion among both ecological theoreticians and empiricists.

Gordon H. Orians

[R]eading this book was extremely enjoyable, thought provoking, and inspirational. For an edited volume it is well integrated, partly by thoughtful and synthetic introductory and concluding chapters and partly by the fact that all contributions are high quality and reference each other where appropriate, which is frequent.

Ecology - Eugene W. Schupp

The Ecology of Place brings together top names from the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology to offer a novel collection that considers how place-based research in ecology contributes to basic scientific understanding. The range of essays, as well as their quality, is noteworthy, and the subjects they cover are timely and important. A celebration of fieldwork and its insights, this book draws worthy attention to what the research of ecologists can tell us about our world.

Paul R. Ehrlich

[R]eading this book was extremely enjoyable, thought provoking, and inspirational. For an edited volume it is well integrated, partly by thoughtful and synthetic introductory and concluding chapters and partly by the fact that all contributions are high quality and reference each other where appropriate, which is frequent.

— Eugene W. Schupp, Utah State University

Ecology

An impressive volume, clearly presented and well integrated to show what has been achieved when ecologists study particular natural environments for long periods. . . . This excellent book is well suited for ecology seminar discussions. Highly recommended.

— F. N. Egerton

Choice