Ecological laws for agroecological design: the need for more organized collaboration in producing, evaluating and updating ecological generalizations

Forey, Oswaldo; Linquist, Stefan

doi:10.1007/s40656-020-00336-9

Original Paper
Published: 15 September 2020

Ecological laws for agroecological design: the need for more organized collaboration in producing, evaluating and updating ecological generalizations

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences volume 42, Article number: 42 (2020) Cite this article

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Abstract

The applied discipline of agroecological design provides a useful case study for examining broader philosophical questions about the existence and importance of ecological generalizations or “laws.” Recent developments in the availability and use of formal meta-analyses have led to the discovery of many resilient generalizations in ecology (Linquist et al. 2016). However, these “laws” face numerous challenges when it comes to their practical application. Concerns about their reliability and scope might stem from unclear logical and epistemic connections to more foundational or “unifying” generalizations (Lean in Philos Top 47(1), 2019) which, in ecology, tend to be derived from first principles and in association with highly abstract models. This raises questions about the nature of those foundational generalizations themselves. In particular, how resilient are they compared to the generalizations uncovered by empirically driven methods? Here we propose a procedure for evaluating the resilience of generalizations across five ecologically relevant dimensions. This procedure was applied to seven well known foundational generalizations in ecology. Surprisingly, it turned out to be impossible to estimate the resilience of these foundational generalizations based on the available literature. This points to the need for a more centralized repository of information about ecological generalizations, created with the explicit aim of evaluating such important dimensions as causal mechanism and predictive power.

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Notes

A reviewer of this paper noted that a potential limitation of this approach is that closely related species are thought to be functionally similar in their ecological roles. Thus, a measure of taxonomic breadth might be more informative were it to focus on higher categories (above the species level) where functional similarities are more likely a product of convergent evolution. This is a useful suggestion provided that higher taxa are indeed more functionally disparate than species (of which there are many known exceptions). At the same time, a functional classification spanning all taxa and/or their ecological roles does not exist. Indeed, this is a topic of considerable debate in ecology. Thus we have relied for this analysis on species-level classification.
https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/habitat-classification-scheme, consulted the 23/03/2020.
https://knb.ecoinformatics.org/about, consulted the 23/03/2020.
https://codeocean.com, consulted the 23/03/2020.
https://github.com, consulted the 23/03/2020.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Fondation de France and the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. We would like to thank the UERI Gotheron for its support, two anonymous reviewers for encouraging comments, and the editors for their patience.

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INRAE, UERI Gotheron, Saint-Marcel-lès-Valence, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France
Oswaldo Forey
Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada
Stefan Linquist

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Oswaldo Forey
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Stefan Linquist
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Correspondence to Oswaldo Forey.

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Forey, O., Linquist, S. Ecological laws for agroecological design: the need for more organized collaboration in producing, evaluating and updating ecological generalizations. HPLS 42, 42 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00336-9

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Received: 29 July 2019
Accepted: 25 August 2020
Published: 15 September 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-020-00336-9

Keywords

Philosophy of ecology
Ecological laws
Ecological principles
Generalization in ecology
Agroecological design