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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2011

  • Title: Two philosophical dilemma raised by long-term ecological research
  • Primary Author: Ayelet Shavit (Tel Hai Academic College - Israel)
  • Abstract:

    The ability to replicate a physical process and reproduce its empirical results is the essence of science. Every long-term ecological resurvey begins by replicating a visit to the same location in the field and reproducing location data and metadata. However two different concepts of space – exogenous and endogenous – which are both necessary for any rigorous resurvey, are nonetheless committed to different practices - a representative grid and a comprehensive description respectably - with no common measurement. This gap with regard to 'location' became a challenge for reproducing location data for two long-term studies that attempted to replicate a survey outdoors (Shavit and Griesemer, 2009, 2010, 2011); yet it was successfully minded by Harvard-LTER's experiment on foundational species, since the experiment was tightly controlled, from the very beginning, to comprehensively record its representative practices. In that sense, rigorous reproduction of location data seems to be achieved by building a single-long-experiment rather than by robust replications of that experiment. One seems to choose between replication and reproduction. If the first dilemma addressed different concepts of 'space' the second addresses different applications of 'complexity'. Models such as foundational species (e.g. niche construction, eco-engineers or landscape modulator) are often ignored, because their acceptance as a theoretical possibility seems to require more complex fieldwork. Yet following two long-term surveys of species distribution illustrates an unexpected flaw in this heuristic. In these cases, not taking account of the phenomenon of foundational species in the field is scientifically impractical. In these cases, if one wishes to disregard these models, one will need to tackle the formidable task of explicating their theoretical flaws or clarifying what exactly is 'complex' about them theoretically. Appeals to more complex and less practical fieldwork do not seem to work.

  • Research Category: Historical and Retrospective Studies