Evolution of interdisciplinarity in biodiversity science

Abstract

The study of biodiversity has grown exponentially in the last thirty years in response to demands for greater understanding of the function and importance of Earth's biodiversity and finding solutions to conserve it. Here, we test the hypothesis that biodiversity science has become more interdisciplinary over time. To do so, we analyze 97,945 peer‐reviewed articles over a twenty‐two‐year time period (1990–2012) with a continuous time dynamic model, which classifies articles into concepts (i.e., topics and ideas) based on word co‐occurrences. Using the model output, we then quantify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: concept diversity, that is, the diversity of topics and ideas across subdisciplines in biodiversity science, subdiscipline diversity, that is, the diversity of subdisciplines across concepts, and network structure, which captures interactions between concepts and subdisciplines. We found that, on average, concept and subdiscipline diversity in biodiversity science were either stable or declining, patterns which were driven by the persistence of rare concepts and subdisciplines and a decline in the diversity of common concepts and subdisciplines, respectively. Moreover, our results provide evidence that conceptual homogenization, that is, decreases in temporal β concept diversity, underlies the observed trends in interdisciplinarity. Together, our results reveal that biodiversity science is undergoing a dynamic phase as a scientific discipline that is consolidating around a core set of concepts. Our results suggest that progress toward addressing the biodiversity crisis via greater interdisciplinarity during the study period may have been slowed by extrinsic factors, such as the failure to invest in research spanning across concepts and disciplines. However, recent initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) may attract broader support for biodiversity‐related issues and hence interdisciplinary approaches to address scientific, political, and societal challenges in the coming years.

A cross-scale assessment of productivity-diversity relationships

“…show that mechanisms associated with S→NPP and NPP→S likely underpin the context dependency of diversity-productivity relationships across spatial grains (Table 1). These recent developments in BEF research and macroecology suggest that conceptual integration between these two disciplines is just beginning (Craven et al, 2019), yet further efforts to bridge disciplinary gaps are essential to deepen current understanding of mechanisms that underpin the shifts in diversity-productivity relationships across spatial scales.…”

Recommendations for establishing global collaborative networks in soil ecology

“…As such, it is not surprising to discover the expansion of interdisciplinary and international collaboration in ecology over the years (Goring et al 2014, Vermeulen et al 2013, Craven et al 2019), a general trend shared by other scientific fields (Adams 2012), and the growing interest in developing global networks of ecological experiments and surveys (Table 1). Collaborative research networks such as the Nutrient Network (Borer et al 2014), TreeDivNet (Verheyen et al 2015), the US Long Term Ecological Research network (Johnson et al 2010) and BIOCOM (Maestre et al 2012) have provided key scientific insights regarding how natural and semi-natural ecosystems function and are responding to multiple global environmental change drivers.…”

The archives are half-empty: a field-wide assessment of the availability of microbial community sequencing data

“…In contrast, figshare is a general repository which hosts most forms of research output (https://figshare.com/), but it is neither sequence-specific nor richly searchable. Microbiome research spans a wide range of fields including ecology, epidemiology, medicine, biotechnology, and agricultural engineering, and is likely to become more integrative in the future (34). Synthesis efforts to bridge knowledge gaps across environments (6) will likely rely on the ability to find data by searching databases directly, rather than resorting to a body of literature which is currently spread across the journals from various fields.…”