Abstract
Humans have observed the natural world and how people interact with it for millennia. Over the past century, synthesis and expansion of that understanding has occurred under the banner of the ‘new’ discipline of ecology. The mechanisms considered operate in and between many different scales – from the individual and short time frames, up through populations, communities, land/seascapes and ecosystems. Whereas some of these scales have been more readily studied than others – particularly the population to regional landscape scales – over the course of the past twenty years new unifying insights have been possible via the application of ideas from new perspectives, such as the fields of complexity and network theory. At any sufficiently large gathering (and with sufficient lubrication) discussions over whether ecologists will ever uncover unifying laws and what they may look like still persist. Any pessimism expressed tends to grow from acknowledgement that gaping holes still exist in our understanding of the natural world and its functioning, especially at the smallest and grandest scales. Conceptualisation of some fundamental ideas, such as evolution, are also undergoing review as global change presents levels of directional pressure on ecosystems not previously seen in recorded history. New sensor and monitoring technologies are opening up new data streams at volumes that can seem overwhelming but also provide an opportunity for a profusion of new discoveries by marrying data across scales in volumes hitherto infeasible. As with so many aspects of science and life, now is an exciting time to be an ecologist.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Biogeography and Macroecology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Whereas, finding universal properties of structure and function is a comforting anchor for those trying to understand, conserve or manage the world around us, the reality is that contingent dynamics of complex systems is the recurrent theme and challenge of the new generation of ecological problems
Growing from the concept of including only the key interactions and processes needed to reproduce the dynamics of the phenomena of interest (Levin, 1992), “Models of Intermediate Complexity for Ecosystem assessments” (MICE) have tackled this marine systems operational challenge by employing simple formulations that are statistically fit to available data, but applied across ecological-environmental-anthropogenic dimensions, to explain the dynamics of small groups of interconnected species (Plagányi et al, 2014)
Summary
Models have many roles in ecology—from explanatory (conceptual) exploration of theoretical hypotheses, to anticipatory predictions to guide short-term tactical decision making, or longerterm projections to inform strategic direction setting (FAO, 2008; Mouquet et al, 2015). While predictive capacity is important when models are being used to guide explicit decision making, models are useful conversation starters to generate interest and discussion around a topic It is the authors’ experience that more breakthrough learnings about system function have eventuated when a model has been wrong than when it has been right (as all involved are keen to know why it was wrong, fewer people ask when a model matches observations or expectations). All of these roles continue a long tradition of synthesizing knowledge in generalisable and useful forms. Humanity has been codifying its theories about the function of the world since the earliest story tellers and religious practices, the discipline of ecology was not formally recognized until
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