Recently we invited you to ask us anything. Today’s question comes from Falko Buschke, who asks (paraphrasing) “What breakthrough in ecological theory could have the biggest impact on applied conservation?” Falko adds that he means “theory” in the broad sense of ideas and ways of thinking, but that “theory” doesn’t include “better empirical data.”
Jeremy’s answer:
My own research is about as far removed from applied conservation as you can get while still calling yourself an ecologist, so I’m the wrong person to answer this question. But that feels like a cop-out, so I’ll do my best to answer anyway. Uninformed answer coming–consider yourself warned!
I’m dubious about the premise of the question. Why would we think that there is any recent, or even possible, breakthrough in ecological theory (broadly defined) that would have any detectable impact on conservation? Applied ecology papers these days rarely even mention terms associated with ecological theories or concepts. Conservation papers in particular are increasingly focused on the social and political drivers of conservation success, rather than the ecological drivers (Staples et al. 2019, Hintzen et al. 2020). And I think it’s hard to argue that conservation biologists have made a collective mistake in shifting their focus as they have. The problems the world’s non-human species face mostly aren’t the sorts of ecological problems that ecological theory speaks to. And insofar as ecological theory is useful in conservation, we already have the theory we need. For instance, we already have enough stochastic models of small populations to allow us to calculate a rough guesstimate of the likely survival time of a small population of some species we know little about. So as to help decide whether to confer on that species some official legal status, such as (in the US) “endangered.”
So if you’re looking for a new idea that would impact conservation in a big way, I don’t think you should look for an ecological idea. You should look for an idea about people–a sociological, political, or economic idea. The abundance agenda, for instance. Not endorsing or criticizing the abundance agenda (I have my opinions but I’m keeping them to myself). Just throwing it out there as an example of a big political-slash-economic idea that already has enough traction in the US not to be totally pie in the sky, and that has a lot of implications for how we think about and pursue conservation and environmental policy.
Brian’s answer:
First, I’ll agree with Jeremy that a lot of what is big in conceptual ecology is irrelevant to conservation biology. I teach a graduate community ecology class with about 2/3 of the students based in forestry, wildlife, fisheries, and agriculture (which makes a really great mix). And I am able (just barely) to convince them that learning competition and predator prey models is worthwhile. And ideas like metapopulations and island biogeography are central to conservation. But neutral theory, coexistence theory, and many other ideas are impossible to convince applied students of their utility (and in truth I don’t really try very hard). That said here’s my stab at two ideas that conservation could benefit from adopting. The first might fit the definition of a breakthrough, although it has been building for 20 years. The second is definitely not a breakthrough, being very old, but might be gaining renewed attention, and is underappreciated in conservation.
First, the notion of non-equilibrium. Of course the notion of equilibria also to some degree originated in conceptual ecology, but it also originated in the human mind and innate biases. That said, conceptual ecology (led by paleoecology) has spent the last 20 years increasingly getting our minds around the fact that “change is everywhere and always”. Systems are not only under constant perturbation that could be dismissed as noise, they’re under long term directional press. Global change and global warming certainly epitomize this. But systems show long term trends even in the absence of humans. This presents a challenge to a field named after the notion of keeping forever what already exists. Of course conservation has long also had an aspect of managing change (and even creating positive change in restoration ecology). But I think conservation might do well to try to learn from what conceptual ecology has pieced together about how common change is and how that change occurs, and think on a deep level about what that implies for the mission of conservation biology.
And an old idea that goes back to at least the 1950s in conceptual ecology: the fundamental niche. The whole idea behind the fundamental niche is that species can live lots of places where they are not found presently. The Hutchinsonian fundamental niche mostly attributes this to biotic interactions. But a modern understanding probably includes historical contingency and dispersal limitation. There is even growing evidence that species are not necessarily most fit where they are most abundant. So simply measuring the properties (e.g. habitat, vegetation structure) of where a species is found today, is not necessarily revealing to us where this species could live in the future or even where this species would do best living today. This has implications for habitat assessment. It also has huge implications for using SDMs for future projection based on president realized niche.