Abstract
The study of biodiversity has grown exponentially in the last thirty years in response to demands for greater understanding of the function and importance of Earth's biodiversity and finding solutions to conserve it. Here, we test the hypothesis that biodiversity science has become more interdisciplinary over time. To do so, we analyze 97,945 peer‐reviewed articles over a twenty‐two‐year time period (1990–2012) with a continuous time dynamic model, which classifies articles into concepts (i.e., topics and ideas) based on word co‐occurrences. Using the model output, we then quantify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: concept diversity, that is, the diversity of topics and ideas across subdisciplines in biodiversity science, subdiscipline diversity, that is, the diversity of subdisciplines across concepts, and network structure, which captures interactions between concepts and subdisciplines. We found that, on average, concept and subdiscipline diversity in biodiversity science were either stable or declining, patterns which were driven by the persistence of rare concepts and subdisciplines and a decline in the diversity of common concepts and subdisciplines, respectively. Moreover, our results provide evidence that conceptual homogenization, that is, decreases in temporal β concept diversity, underlies the observed trends in interdisciplinarity. Together, our results reveal that biodiversity science is undergoing a dynamic phase as a scientific discipline that is consolidating around a core set of concepts. Our results suggest that progress toward addressing the biodiversity crisis via greater interdisciplinarity during the study period may have been slowed by extrinsic factors, such as the failure to invest in research spanning across concepts and disciplines. However, recent initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) may attract broader support for biodiversity‐related issues and hence interdisciplinary approaches to address scientific, political, and societal challenges in the coming years.
Highlights
Conserving biodiversity came to prominence as a global issue toward the end of the 20th century amid growing concerns for biodiversity change (Butchart et al, 2010; Pereira et al, 2010)
We found that two proxies used to quantify interdisciplinarity in biodiversity science, concept and subdiscipline diversity, were either stable or declining between 1990 and 2012
In contrast to well‐established disciplines such as physics, math‐ ematics, and medicine (Pan et al, 2012; Porter & Rafols, 2009), our results do not support the hypothesis that biodiversity science is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary
Summary
Conserving biodiversity came to prominence as a global issue toward the end of the 20th century amid growing concerns for biodiversity change (Butchart et al, 2010; Pereira et al, 2010). Biodiversity science (United Nations, 1992)—a field of study spanning a variety of related and well‐defined subdisci‐ plines—has expanded greatly in size, that is, number of publications, and in breadth, that is, range of subdisciplines (Loreau, 2010) Underlying this growth is an array of complex scientific problems centered around the description and prediction of biodiversity patterns and processes using data from genes, individuals, communities, and ecosystems across temporal and spatial scales (Chase et al, 2018; Price & Schmitz, 2016) as well as their implications for and linkages to other global po‐ litical and societal challenges, such as climate change, human health, and poverty (Adams et al, 2004; Barnosky et al, 2012; Cardinale et al, 2012; Civitello et al, 2015). Despite appeals for interdisciplinary approaches in biodiversity science to meet scientific, political, and so‐ cietal challenges (Liu et al, 2007), numerous barriers, such as commu‐ nication difficulties and institutional barriers, may prevent the adoption of interdisciplinary approaches (Roy et al, 2013)
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