Ecologists are known as alarmists. Dealing with things that are irrelevant to daily life and likely to have only long term consequences, we naturally deal in doomsday scenarios to get attention. This is tiresome, if not downright misleading. My last review of what ecology can tell us was 12 years ago. I propose to revisit this subject and go into further detail on what useful conclusions the science of ecology can offer.
Last time, I offered the conclusions that:
- Size matters – you can predict the number and feeding rates of animals from their size
- Energy creates diversity – hotter (and wetter) places have more species
- Diversity creates stability – rare or little-known species play a role in maintaining the foods, fibers and vistas that we expect from nature
- Landscapes have a tipping point – developing or exploiting more than half of a natural landscape will lead to species loss
- Ecosystems are what they eat – the pattern of species eating each other is predictable
These predictions are only useful if 1) they are precise enough to guide the management of natural landscapes and seascapes and 2) they line up with the values of society. Both conditions are a challenge for this century-old discipline.
The basis for this review will be the “Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology”, an 823 page overview of different approaches to the “experimental analysis of [the] distribution and abundance” of species. The focus tends to be on species other than our own but, in order to meet the second condition of usefulness, we will keep returning to the relevance of these predictions for humans. Of the 129 articles in the encyclopedia, a quarter of them are about mathematical techniques. I will be mostly avoiding these except where they produce something particularly useful. Another quarter of the articles focus on the abundance of single species. The remaining breakdown is as follows: evolution (12%), applications (11%), communities of species (10%), ecosystems (8%), physiology (6%) , and major themes (6%). Having written a recent post on evolutionary ecology, I will give that sub-discipline a pass.
My outline then is to post reviews of 1) ecotoxicology, 2) conservation biology, 3) spatial ecology, and 4) ecosystem science. I will begin with ecotoxicology because it is intertwined with a word closely associated with ecology: pollution.