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

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

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.

Related collections

Most cited references 41

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Environmental heterogeneity as a universal driver of species richness across taxa, biomes and spatial scales.

Anke Stein, Katharina Gerstner, Holger Kreft (2014)

Environmental heterogeneity is regarded as one of the most important factors governing species richness gradients. An increase in available niche space, provision of refuges and opportunities for isolation and divergent adaptation are thought to enhance species coexistence, persistence and diversification. However, the extent and generality of positive heterogeneity-richness relationships are still debated. Apart from widespread evidence supporting positive relationships, negative and hump-shaped relationships have also been reported. In a meta-analysis of 1148 data points from 192 studies worldwide, we examine the strength and direction of the relationship between spatial environmental heterogeneity and species richness of terrestrial plants and animals. We find that separate effects of heterogeneity in land cover, vegetation, climate, soil and topography are significantly positive, with vegetation and topographic heterogeneity showing particularly strong associations with species richness. The use of equal-area study units, spatial grain and spatial extent emerge as key factors influencing the strength of heterogeneity-richness relationships, highlighting the pervasive influence of spatial scale in heterogeneity-richness studies. We provide the first quantitative support for the generality of positive heterogeneity-richness relationships across heterogeneity components, habitat types, taxa and spatial scales from landscape to global extents, and identify specific needs for future comparative heterogeneity-richness research. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/CNRS.

0 comments Cited 448 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Are There General Laws in Ecology?

John Lawton (1999)

0 comments Cited 363 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Neutral macroecology.

G. Bell (2001)

The central themes of community ecology-distribution, abundance, and diversity-display strongly marked and very general patterns. These include the log-normal distribution of abundance, the relation between range and abundance, the species-area law, and the turnover of species composition. Each pattern is the subject of a large literature that interprets it in terms of ecological processes, typically involving the sorting of differently specialized species onto heterogeneous landscapes. All of these patterns can be shown to arise, however, from neutral community models in which all individuals have identical properties, as the consequence of local dispersal alone. This implies, at the least, that functional interpretations of these patterns must be reevaluated. More fundamentally, neutral community models provide a general theory for biodiversity and conservation biology capable of predicting the fundamental processes and patterns of community ecology.