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Ahead to Students Track Spring's Journey North, by Elizabeth Donnelly

Basic and Applied Ecology: A False Dichotomy, by Gordon H. Orians

The overdrawn distinction between basic and applied ecology, oft discussed in rather pejorative terms, is one component of a tendency of people to describe complex phenomena in terms of polar opposites. Our conceptual language abounds in such polar typology--good-evil, rural-urban, innate-learned, heredity-environment, and preformation-epigenesis. The foundations of this prevalent typology probably are programmed deeply in the human brain, which is designed to evaluate complex inputs to enable prompt and appropriate action. And action is fundamentally polar.

Whether or not the tendency to divide continuous variation into polar opposites is an evolved trait, it is striking that the degree to which ecologists have debated and contrasted the merits of basic and applied ecology does not match the strong interactions between the two types of endeavors that have characterized the field throughout its history. The first life tables were constructed by Ulpian in the third century to enable the Romans to determine the amount of funds that needed to be set aside to cover insurance needs of the members of religious societies. In more recent times, insurance companies funded the pioneering demographic studies on Drosophila by Raymond Pearl (Kingsland 1985). The theoretical physicist Vito Volterra developed his famous equations of population dynamics to assist his son-in-law, a fisheries biologist, with pressing Italian fisheries problems.

I could cite many more examples illustrating that throughout its history, ecology has both contributed to environmental problem-solving and also has been stimulated by urgent practical problems (Orians 1990). Today two pressing environmental problems are profoundly influencing ecology as a basic science: impending global climate change and the likely extinction of a significant fraction of the world's species during the next century, primarily as a result of the cooption by humans of about one-third of global primary production (Vitousek et al. 1986). These problems stimulated the rise of the discipline of conservation biology, but at the same time they have had important influences on the conceptual and empirical orientation of ecology, encouraging types of research that had been relatively neglected. Three areas of ecology exemplify the close relationship between ecology and conservation biology.

Population Ecology. Dynamics of small populations have been of considerable interest to ecologists and geneticists ever since Sewall Wright demonstrated the potentially powerful influence of random genetic drift in small populations. Prior to the interest in viability of populations reduced to low numbers by human actions, population genetic research was dominated by questions of the role of drift in promoting adaptations and new evolutionary directions.

Endangerment of many species as a result of human activities has stimulated interest in the short-term consequences of bottlenecks on the loss of heterozygosity, the influence of number of generations at small population sizes on the loss of genetic variability, inbreeding depression and the competitive abilities of small populations, and the chances of population recovery when environmental conditions ameliorate.

Prior to the rise of conservation concerns, ecologists tended to study common species where they were common. This bias was driven both by the relative ease with which common species can be studied and by the perception that rare species differ from common species only in having fewer individuals. When rare species were studied it was primarily from the perspective of population regulation and, for the most part, regulation was viewed in purely proximate terms. Conservation biology has provided an expanded rationale for the study of rare species, thereby stimulating thinking and empirical research that has revealed that rare species also often differ qualitatively from common species. If rare species differ from common ones because they evolved traits that improve performance at low population densities, the "newly rare" species being created in large numbers by human activities may be more vulnerable than the "old-time" rare species and, hence, in need of species management measures.

Geographical Ecology. Ecologists have long been interested in species' geographical range limits. Indeed, in the mid-1950s debate raged over whether there was something special about boundaries or whether, as Andrewartha and Birch (1954) insisted, the edge of the range was simply the place where population density was reduced to zero. Renewed interest in species range limits has been stimulated by prospects of global warming. New issues being investigated include the rate at which species ranges can shift, ability of individuals to move across landscapes punctuated by many barriers, and the southern limits of species where cold temperatures certainly are not a significant concern. Research on metapopulation ecology is currently much more intense than it would be in the absence of conservation concerns.

Community Ecology. Although it has been known for many years that small habitat fragments have fewer species than larger fragments, the rules that determine why, and which species are more likely to fail to persist in small fragments, were not investigated intensively until the rise of conservation biology (Terborgh 1974). The need to repair degraded landscapes has given rise to the sub-discipline of restoration ecology, which both draws upon basic ecological knowledge and provides tests of our understanding of how communities are assembled and function. As restoration ecologists are fond of pointing out, restoration is the "acid test" of ecological knowledge. If we can't reassemble functioning communities, we don't yet know how they work.

Many of us are motivated by our ethical responsibilities as stewards of Earth's biological richness. These concerns heighten our interest in applying our knowledge and skills to preserving biodiversity. Fortunately, to do so we need not abandon doing fundamental research that contributes to our basic understanding of the functioning of ecological systems. Modern ecology demonstrates that nothing is more applied than good basic research.

Gordon H. Orians received a 1996 SCB Distinguished Service Award for his many years of dedicated professional leadership as a conservation scientist, teacher, administrator, and mentor.

Literature Cited

• Andrewartha, H.G. and L.C. Birch. 1954. The Distribution and Abundance of Animals. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois.
• Kingsland, S. 1985. Modelling Nature. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois.
• Orians, G.H. 1990. Ecology and conservation biology: mutually supportive sciences. Physiol. Ecol. Japan (Special Number):151-165.
• Terborgh, J. 1974. Preservation of natural diversity: the problem of extinction prone species. BioScience 24:715-722.
• Vitousek, P.M., P.R. Ehrlich, A.H. Ehrlich and P.A. Matson. 1986. Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis. BioScience 36:368-373.

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Ahead to Students Track Spring's Journey North, by Elizabeth Donnelly