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8 - The role of experiments in landscape ecology

from PART II - Theory, experiments, and models in landscape ecology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2009

By
Rolf A. Ims
Edited by
John A. Wiens  and
Michael R. Moss
Rolf A. Ims
Affiliation:
Institute of Biology University of Tromsø Norway
John A. Wiens
Affiliation:
The Nature Conservancy, Washington DC
Michael R. Moss
Affiliation:
University of Guelph, Ontario
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Summary

Why should landscape ecologists conduct experiments?

Experiments play a crucial role in science. They provide the most reliable and efficient means of establishing knowledge. Only proper experiments can establish cause–effect relations between processes and patterns as well as unambiguous links between abstract theory and material nature. Thus, experiments should be a part of scientific enquiries, whenever feasible and ethical.

Landscape ecology, however, is a scientific discipline relatively devoid of experiments. This well known, albeit undesirable, state of affairs is often said to stem from lack of practical feasibility to conduct landscape ecological experiments. True, landscape ecologists are frequently concerned with phenomena covering temporal and spatial scales that are too broad to facilitate an essential ingredient of proper experimental design; that is, replicates of treatment levels are randomized among a sample of experimental units. Clearly, if the extent of the experimental units encompasses region-wide landscapes and the treatments constitute levels of landscape variables such as composition and connectivity, proper experiments may not be feasible. So-called “quasi-experiments” or “natural experiments,” which denote single large-scale accidental or intentional perturbations at the landscape level, or “mensurative experiments,” referring to any kind of comparison with respect to a focal environmental variable (Hulbert, 1984; McGarigal and Cushman, 2002), provide unique opportunities for informative observations in landscape ecology. However, such approaches do not necessarily give rise to unbiased estimation of effect sizes and confidence intervals. This can only be reliably obtained through proper experiments.

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Information
Issues and Perspectives in Landscape Ecology , pp. 70 - 78
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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