It’s Good to Share SORANNO, PATRICIA A.; CHERUVELIL, KENDRA S.; ELLIOTT, KEVIN C. ...
Bioscience,
01/2015, Letnik:
65, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Although there have been many recent calls for increased data sharing, the majority of environmental scientists do not make their individual data sets publicly available in online repositories. ...Current data-sharing conversations are focused on overcoming the technological challenges associated with data sharing and the lack of rewards and incentives for individuals to share data. We argue that the most important conversation has yet to take place: There has not been a strong ethical impetus for sharing data within the current culture, behaviors, and practices of environmental scientists. In this article, we describe a critical shift that is happening in both society and the environmental science community that makes data sharing not just good but ethically obligatory. This is a shift toward the ethical value of promoting inclusivity within and beyond science. An essential element of a truly inclusionary and democratic approach to science is to share data through publicly accessible data sets.
Ecological research increasingly relies on broad-scale databases containing information collected by personnel from a variety of sources, including government agencies, universities, and ...citizen-science programs. However, the contribution of citizen-science programs to these databases is not well known. We analyzed one such database to quantify the contribution of citizen science to lake water-quality data from seven US states. Citizen-science programs not only provided over half of the observations for commonly sampled water-quality measures (water clarity, nutrients, and algal biomass) from the past 31 years, but also contributed to the majority of long-term monitoring (>15 years) for selected measures in lakes. While previous studies have demonstrated the usefulness of citizen science for research, management, policy, and public engagement, our study demonstrates that citizen science can also make valuable contributions to populating broad-scale ecological databases. Strengthening partnerships between citizen-science programs and monitoring agencies can help maintain and expand spatial and temporal data coverage during the “big data” era of ecology.
Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to understand ecological systems at scales critical to human decision making. Current reward structures are problematic for scientists engaged in ...interdisciplinary research, particularly early career researchers, because academic culture tends to value only some research outputs, such as primary-authored publications. Here, we present a framework for the costs and benefits of collaboration, with a focus on early career stages, and show how the implementation of novel measures of success can help defray the costs of collaboration. Success measures at team and individual levels include research outputs other than publications, including educational outcomes, dataset creation, outreach products (eg blogs or social media), and the application of scientific results to policy or management activities. Promotion and adoption of new measures of success will require concerted effort by both collaborators and their institutions. Expanded measures should better reflect and reward the important work of both disciplinary and interdisciplinary teams at all career stages, and help sustain and stimulate a collaborative culture within ecology.
Scientists have been debating for centuries the nature of proper scientific methods. Currently, criticisms being thrown at data-intensive science are reinvigorating these debates. However, many of ...these criticisms represent long-standing conflicts over the role of hypothesis testing in science and not just a dispute about the amount of data used. Here, we show that an iterative account of scientific methods developed by historians and philosophers of science can help make sense of data-intensive scientific practices and suggest more effective ways to evaluate this research. We use case studies of Darwin’s research on evolution by natural selection and modern-day research on macrosystems ecology to illustrate this account of scientific methods and the innovative approaches to scientific evaluation that it encourages. We point out recent changes in the spheres of science funding, publishing, and education that reflect this richer account of scientific practice, and we propose additional reforms.
Collaborative research teams are a necessary and desirable component of most scientific endeavors. Effective collaborative teams exhibit important research outcomes, far beyond what could be ...accomplished by individuals working independently. These teams are made up of researchers who are committed to a common purpose, approach, and performance goals for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. We call such collaborations "high-performing collaborative research teams". Here, we share lessons learned from our collective experience working with a wide range of collaborative teams and structure those lessons within a framework developed from literature in business, education, and a relatively new discipline, "science of team science". We propose that high-performing collaborative research teams are created and maintained when team diversity (broadly defined) is effectively fostered and interpersonal skills are taught and practiced. Finally, we provide some strategies to foster team functioning and make recommendations for improving the collaborative culture in ecology.
Ecologists are increasingly discovering that ecological processes are made up of components that are multi-scaled in space and time. Some of the most complex of these processes are cross-scale ...interactions (CSIs), which occur when components interact across scales. When undetected, such interactions may cause errors in extrapolation from one region to another. CSIs, particularly those that include a regional scaled component, have not been systematically investigated or even reported because of the challenges of acquiring data at sufficiently broad spatial extents. We present an approach for quantifying CSIs and apply it to a case study investigating one such interaction, between local and regional scaled land-use drivers of lake phosphorus. Ultimately, our approach for investigating CSIs can serve as a basis for efforts to understand a wide variety of multi-scaled problems such as climate change, land-use/land-cover change, and invasive species.
Eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV) is an expanding mosquito-borne threat to humans and domestic animal populations in the northeastern United States. Outbreaks of EEEV are challenging to ...predict due to spatial and temporal uncertainty in the abundance and viral infection of Cs. melanura, the principal enzootic vector. EEEV activity may be closely linked to wetlands because they provide essential habitat for mosquito vectors and avian reservoir hosts. However, wetlands are not homogeneous and can vary by vegetation, connectivity, size, and inundation patterns. Wetlands may also have different effects on EEEV transmission depending on the assessed spatial scale. We investigated associations between wetland characteristics and Cs. melanura abundance and infection with EEEV at multiple spatial scales in Connecticut, USA.
Our findings indicate that wetland vegetative characteristics have strong associations with Cs. melanura abundance. Deciduous and evergreen forested wetlands were associated with higher Cs. melanura abundance, likely because these wetlands provide suitable subterranean habitat for Cs. melanura development. In contrast, Cs. melanura abundance was negatively associated with emergent and scrub/shrub wetlands, and wetland connectivity to streams. These relationships were generally strongest at broad spatial scales. Additionally, the relationships between wetland characteristics and EEEV infection in Cs. melanura were generally weak. However, Cs. melanura abundance was strongly associated with EEEV infection, suggesting that wetland-associated changes in abundance may be indirectly linked to EEEV infection in Cs. melanura. Finally, we found that wet hydrological conditions during the transmission season and during the fall/winter preceding the transmission season were associated with higher Cs. melanura abundance and EEEV infection, indicating that wet conditions are favorable for EEEV transmission.
These results expand the broad-scale understanding of the effects of wetlands on EEEV transmission and help to reduce the spatial and temporal uncertainty associated with EEEV outbreaks.
The emergence of macrosystems ecology (MSE), which focuses on regional- to continental-scale ecological patterns and processes, builds upon a history of long-term and broad-scale studies in ecology. ...Scientists face the difficulty of integrating the many elements that make up macrosystems, which consist of hierarchical processes at interacting spatial and temporal scales. Researchers must also identify the most relevant scales and variables to be considered, the required data resources, and the appropriate study design to provide the proper inferences. The large volumes of multi-thematic data often associated with macrosystem studies typically require validation, standardization, and assimilation. Finally, analytical approaches need to describe how cross-scale and hierarchical dynamics and interactions relate to macroscale phenomena. Here, we elaborate on some key methodological challenges of MSE research and discuss existing and novel approaches to meet them.
Inland water bodies and their surface hydrologic connections are active components in the landscape, influencing multiple ecological processes that can propagate to broad‐scale phenomena such as ...regional nutrient and carbon cycles and metapopulation dynamics. However, while lake, wetland, and stream abundance has been estimated at regional and global extents, less attention has been paid to freshwater connectivity attributes among aquatic systems at macroscales. Thus, regional to continental patterns of freshwater abundance and connectivity are poorly understood. We measured lake, wetland, and stream abundance and surface connectivity attributes (i.e., landscape position within stream networks) at a subcontinental extent in the Midwest and Northeast United States to characterize macroscale spatial patterns of the freshwater landscape (i.e., abundance and connectivity attributes of lakes, wetlands, and streams). We found that lake and wetland abundance exhibited opposite spatial patterns from stream density that generally followed glaciation extent boundaries—lake and wetland abundance was high north of the glaciation boundary, whereas stream density was high south of the glaciation boundary. Freshwater connectivity attributes exhibited distinct spatial patterns as defined by our integrated freshwater clusters and revealed a layer of complexity not captured by abundance measures. Patterns of freshwater abundance and connectivity in the study extent were associated primarily with glaciation and secondarily with hydrogeomorphic (e.g., surficial geology and topography), climate (e.g., runoff), and land‐use (e.g., agriculture) variables, providing insight into potential drivers of freshwater composition and distribution. The connectivity spatial patterns observed suggest that relying solely on freshwater abundance measures in macroscale analyses omits unique information on the structural attributes of freshwater systems that can be critical to key ecological processes. Adopting an integrated freshwater landscape framework to study and manage freshwaters is essential as freshwater systems face broad‐scale disturbances that may alter hydrologic connections and subsequently may impact ecosystem processes and services.
Identifying lake networks and knowing the degree of surface‐water connectivity among lakes can help scientists better understand and predict the movement of abiotic materials and biota within ...networks. Quantifying broad‐scale networks that include lake and stream connections is difficult computationally. Starting from the medium resolution National Hydrography Dataset's lakes, streams, and rivers, we applied a graph theory approach to identify lake networks, a set of lakes connected by streams both upstream and downstream. The LAGOS‐US NETWORKS v1 module contains four data tables, one of which includes derived surface‐water connectivity metrics for lakes (n = 86,511 lakes ≥ 1 ha in surface area) and networks (n = 898) within the conterminous United States, including dams. The NETWORKS module also includes a flow table as well as a bidirectional and a unidirectional distance table that provide the stream course distances between every connected lake. Finally, this module includes a detailed User Guide.
PDF
