Introduction: What's Science Got to Do with It?

Despite the potential of applied ecology, there is still disagreement about the extent to which ecological science is applicable to real-world problems.

—Alicia Castillo and Victor M. Toledo (2000)

This book is intended for all those who work toward sustainable and sustained conservation of the landscapes that surround them along with the native biota those landscapes support. What does conservation mean, though? It seems that each of us has a unique and constantly changing definition. At this moment my own definition of conservation is the field of study and action that concerns the management of the landscape so as (1) in the short and medium term, to minimize or buffer negative effects of human beings on nature, which includes the landscape's human inhabitants ourselves, and (2) in the long term, to provide other living beings with the maximum number of alternatives for tolerating and surviving our species' brief presence on this planet.

Getting at Conservation

How might conservation be achieved? The effects—positive, negative, and neutral—of humans on landscapes are the cumulative result of the individual choices that persons and institutions make. Perhaps sustainable and sustained conservation can be achieved only through education at all levels of society so that today's children, tomorrow's adults, become familiar with their natural surroundings, recognize the consequences that alternative decisions might have on those surroundings, and make decisions thoughtfully (Feinsinger, Mangutti, and Oviedo 1997; and see chapter 10). While we strive for that distant goal, though, management by conservation professionals, in consultation with local communities, provides one practical approach to biodiversity conservation (figure 1.1).

How should such management be carried out? The people responsible must develop practical guidelines and apply them to local landscapes in or out of protected areas (figure 1.1). But where do these conservation guidelines originate? Ideally, the people who will implement them will first consider the possible consequences of each reasonable choice and then select the alternative most likely to favor conservation goals while being acceptable to most local communities. By what means, though, can conservation professionals assess the likely consequences of each alternative? Can they simply follow their gut feelings? Sometimes—if and only if their insight into the landscape's natural history and social context is acute. Or should managers defer to "those who must know better" and base their guidelines on appealing, reasonable-sounding, and widely accepted ideas encountered in a published paper or heard at a conference? I certainly hope not (see box 1.1). Instead, might conservation professionals themselves evaluate the various alternatives in the very landscape where they would be applied (figure 1.2)? Yes, through thoughtfully designed and cautiously interpreted studies carried out firsthand (figure 1.1). How might such studies, on the ecological consequences of alternative management decisions, be designed well and interpreted cautiously? By using the approach of scientific inquiry.

Getting at Scientific Inquiry

Let's back up. What do scientific inquiry and science really mean? Formal science (or basic science) consists of two components that are linked by a dynamic process (figure 1.3). One component is the body of accumulated and continuously accumulating observations (data) that researchers generate with reference to the other component, the body of concepts that provide the current frame of reference. In turn, the body of concepts is constantly reevaluated and modified in light of the incoming data. The science process, or scientific inquiry as defined below, provides the means to cycle back and forth between concepts and data.

If science consists of a dynamic cycle, as in figure 1.3, is the isolated act of gathering data "science"? No. Does a long published list of observations (data) bereft of a conceptual context constitute science? No. Does sitting at one's desk and proposing a new theory make one a scientist? No. Does the use of sophisticated electronic instruments or complex statistical procedures justify applying the name "science" to any endeavor? No. Science requires that all four elements illustrated in figure 1.3 be present: the two boxes and the two arrows.

Combining the Two

In this book I'll stress scientific inquiry, the cycling process of figure 1.3, rather than dwelling overlong on details of the figure's two boxes. In the broad sense, scientific inquiry is a means of asking and answering firsthand, as objectively and precisely as possible, a question about a small piece of one's surroundings and then reflecting cautiously on the implications of the answer to the larger world. The quandary is that the concerns of conservation professionals and field ecologists often involve a fairly grand spatial scale on the one hand, and a fairly extensive time scale (the foreseeable future) on the other. In order to make the "correct" conservation decisions or the "correct" interpretations of ecological phenomena with absolute certainty, we'd have to be omniscient regarding that grand scale in time and space.

We aren't omniscient, though. We can't investigate simultaneously all possible individual organisms, populations, species, points in space, and landscapes of interest, nor can we evaluate the consequences of every possible variation of each feasible conservation guideline. We can only work in present time; we have only a fuzzy idea of those past events that might have caused present-day phenomena, and we certainly can't know for certain what the future portends. Thus, conservation scientists and others are restricted to working with "best guesses" based on the information available. That information comes from a sample restricted in space and time. We wish to extrapolate in as error-free a way as...