Vol. 10 - Between the seconds on the chronograph
Navigating the intricate web of ecological scales reveals new research questions and the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration.
Ecologists spend a lot of time thinking about scales. If you search for “problem of scale” in Google Scholar, you get in response the entire corpus of community ecology.
Last week, I had the chance to attend a workshop on early hominins, and we collectively spent a lot of time figuring out the right scale for our research questions. And something interesting, and unexpected as far as I'm concerned, came up in our discussions: as fun as it was to think about what happened at the spatial, temporal, and organization scales, our discussions ended up converging on the space between these scales.
What links the lifespan of an individual to the distribution range of its species? How can the perception of a landscape feed back into dynamics at other scales?
Do we need to understand fine temporal scales to figure out what happens at coarse spatial scales?
We did ask these questions in a more precise way, of course. But these discussions were strangely applicable to a lot of research directions in ecology. We have spent quite a lot of time, probably accidentally or by imitation, organizing our field around different scales. This shows in our curriculum as well: population dynamics, and individual ecology, and macroecology, are taught in different classes. We publish in different journals.
My point is not to argue that we were wrong to work this way — many biological processes actually happen within a context that can be summarized as a series of spatial/temporal scales without sacrificing too much generality. Keeping these as milestones for the foundation of our research programs is a good thing.
But can we, for lack of a better word, scale up?
What emerges between scales is not just additional processes or observations, but potentially full-fledged research questions. Not just feedbacks, but mechanisms that do not fit neatly into our pre-established categories. Thinking of scales this way actually reinforces the need for strong research within well-defined scales because this cannot happen without a strong backbone to ask these new questions.
This also provides an interesting model for working groups! Maybe the complementarity we need to generate creative (read: speculative) ideas is the complementarity between people who look at different aspects of a problem, expressed at drastically different scales.
And with all that said, stay tuned for Vol. 11 next week, for a discussion about why my research program, and my group's research program, don't perfectly overlap, and why it's a good thing.
(ICYMI: the title for this entry is lifted straight from the best 10 minutes and 54 seconds of hip hop ever)