Trends in Ecological Research during the Last Three Decades – A Systematic Review

Abstract

It is thought that the science of ecology has experienced conceptual shifts in recent decades, chiefly from viewing nature as static and balanced to a conception of constantly changing, unpredictable, complex ecosystems. Here, we ask if these changes are reflected in actual ecological research over the last 30 years. We surveyed 750 articles from the entire pool of ecological literature and 750 articles from eight leading journals. Each article was characterized according to its type, ecological domain, and applicability, and major topics. We found that, in contrast to its common image, ecology is still mostly a study of single species (70% of the studies); while ecosystem and community studies together comprise only a quarter of ecological research. Ecological science is somewhat conservative in its topics of research (about a third of all topics changed significantly through time), as well as in its basic methodologies and approaches. However, the growing proportion of problem-solving studies (from 9% in the 1980s to 20% in the 2000 s) may represent a major transition in ecological science in the long run.

A History of Ecological Research Derived from Titles of Articles in the Journal “Ecology,” 1925–2015

“…Three such studies are Swihart (Swihart et al 2002), Nobis (Nobis and Wohlgemuth 2004), and Carmel (Carmel et al 2013), the last two dealt with much shorter time frames. Swihart examined progress in ecology by subjectively scoring articles in "Ecology" from 1920 to 2000 on how they ranged between pure pattern recognition-answering "what" questions-and pure process-based studies-answering "how" or "why" questions.…”

To What Extent Can Existing Research Help Project Climate Change Impacts on Biodiversity in Aquatic Environments? A Review of Methodological Approaches

“…Furthermore, both response type and magnitude are highly context dependent, indicating that unanticipated emergent effects of climate change on ecosystems are likely to occur [34]. As suggested elsewhere [18], eco-evolutionary dynamics and the roles of direct and indirect multi-species interactions can be studied from an evolving meta-community perspective to obtain deeper insights into the complex issue of how abiotic factors and species interactions together and in an interdependent manner shape biodiversity responses to climate change [10,14,18,26,29].…”

“…The effects seen in manipulation studies conducted under semi-natural or laboratory conditions may therefore differ and sometimes be weaker, compared with experiments conducted in the wild [27,28]. Despite this, most ecological studies generally use single-species approaches [29]. A similar pattern is evident among the studies of biodiversity effects of temperature change; the majority (60%) of investigations studied single species; 18% studied two different species; and in 22% of the investigations, three or more focal species were studied.…”

“…Linkage density of interactions and connectance among species within natural food webs may be immensely more complex than anticipated based on direct observations of pairwise encounters [30,31]. Effects of climate change that may be mediated by species interactions, changes in community composition, cascading effects and ecosystem processes [14,26,29] have therefore likely gone undetected in the majority of the experiments.…”

Assessing the structure and temporal dynamics of seabird communities: the challenge of capturing marine ecosystem complexity

“…However, only 17% of ecological studies in the past three decades have been at the community level (Carmel et al . 2013), suggesting that the characterization of changes in food webs at multiple trophic levels remains challenging.…”