Abstract
Visual and numerical abstraction is an everyday affair in ecological research. Technologies capable of collecting and analyzing increasingly finer resolution observations of the environment are becoming common. The resulting new, often visual and digital, forms of representation blur the abstraction and the abstracted. I examine the role of visualization in science practice using a case study of microclimate effects on tree seedlings in a forest with 3D laser scanning and virtual reality technologies. I describe advantages such as continuity across multiple spatial scales, lively interactions, and new perspectives. In addition, I explore potential risks including a false sense of omnipotent control, incomplete representations, singular inscription, and limits to participation. I aim to develop a framework for ecologists to harness the opportunities of new visual technologies in a responsible practice that minimizes their risks.
Highlights
The Many Ways to (Scientifically) Represent a ForestUnderstanding of cognitive processes suggests that visualizations are an important form of representation
Visual communication often results in very fast cognition (Baird et al 1993)
Media+Environment is already constructed (Miller and Burton 1994). Another benefit of visual communication is that visual understanding is an innate process (Hewes 1978, as cited in Seels 1994)
Summary
Understanding of cognitive processes suggests that visualizations are an important form of representation. In Latour’s data requirements, classification and standardization are especially important to make the data scalable, recombinable, and superimposable—that is these practices make data comparable to other data or existing data Haraway cautions that these reductions of the studied entity, especially those enabled by technologies, are partial perspectives. Vertesi (2014) warns that technologies can inscribe perspectives that become so ingrained within a scientific practice that they become the way to see the observed rather than a way to understand it It is in this scientific practice of visual representation, strongly shaped by technological capabilities, that I explore my use of new technologies, terrestrial laser scanning and associated 2D and 3D visually based technologies, in my ecological study of forest regeneration. Because ecological science often produces recommendations that impact ownership and governance of the natural world as well as influence what types of knowledge count, I feel that it is critical for ecology as a discipline to examine its epistemological practice
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