Relationship between conservation biology and ecology shown through machine reading of 32,000 articles.

Rogier E Hintzen,Armand M Leroi,Andrew T Knight,Robert D Holt,Cristina Banks‐Leite,James Rosindell,Morena Mills,Ross Mounce,Marina Papadopoulou

doi:10.1111/cobi.13435

Abstract

Conservation biology was founded on the idea that efforts to save nature depend on a scientific understanding of how it works. It sought to apply ecological principles to conservation problems. We investigated whether the relationship between these fields has changed over time through machine reading the full texts of 32,000 research articles published in 16 ecology and conservation biology journals. We examined changes in research topics in both fields and how the fields have evolved from 2000 to 2014. As conservation biology matured, its focus shifted from ecology to social and political aspects of conservation. The 2 fields diverged and now occupy distinct niches in modern science. We hypothesize this pattern resulted from increasing recognition that social, economic, and political factors are critical for successful conservation and possibly from rising skepticism about the relevance of contemporary ecological theory to practical conservation.

Highlights

Conservation biology was born of a union between ecology and the ethical impulse to preserve its object, the world of living things
Where the most probable words in topic 1 related to conservation biology, and those in topic 2 related to ecology
We modeled the structure of the corpus with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei et al 2003), as implemented in the Python package genism (Rehurek & Sojka 2011)

Summary

Introduction

Conservation biology was born of a union between ecology and the ethical impulse to preserve its object, the world of living things. Though the relationship between science and advocacy has often been fraught (Worster 1994; Cafaro & Primack 2014; Kareiva et al 2014), it is clear to most ecologists that natural diversity demands not merely curiosity, but protection. This is so in good part due to Michael Soule’s founding of a new academic field, conservation biology (Van Dyke 2008). Like cancer biology, he said, conservation biology should rest on scientific and normative principles.

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Conclusion