Big Ecology: The Emergence of Ecosystem Science

Big Ecology: The Emergence of Ecosystem Science

by David C. Coleman
Big Ecology: The Emergence of Ecosystem Science

Big Ecology: The Emergence of Ecosystem Science

by David C. Coleman

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Overview

In Big Ecology, David C. Coleman documents his historically fruitful ecological collaborations in the early years of studying large ecosystems in the United States. As Coleman explains, the concept of the ecosystem—a local biological community and its interactions with its environment—has given rise to many institutions and research programs, like the National Science Foundation’s program for Long Term Ecological Research. Coleman’s insider account of this important and fascinating trend toward big science takes us from the paradigm of collaborative interdisciplinary research, starting with the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957, through the International Biological Program (IBP) of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) programs of the 1980s.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520264755
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 05/14/2010
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 248
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

David C. Coleman is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Fundamentals of Soil Ecology as well as many other books and articles.

Read an Excerpt

Big Ecology

The Emergence of Ecosystem Science
By David C. Coleman

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-26475-5


Chapter One

Intellectual Antecedents to Large-Scale Ecosystem Studies

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. Albert Einstein

The Influence of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) on International Research Networks and Ecosystem Studies 1 The Emergence of Ecosystem Science 4 Historical Roots of IBP in North America (1967–1974) 12

THE INFLUENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR (IGY) ON INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH NETWORKS AND ECOSYSTEM STUDIES

International scientific collaborations have a long and illustrious history that extends back into the nineteenth century. Biological programs lagged the programs in physics and astronomy until the advent of the International Biological Program (IBP) in the middle of the twentieth century. As a result of the IBP and the recognition of biology as the basis of ecological science, all the later efforts to build a "big ecology" begin with this program. Prior to IBP, a nearly ideal example for biologists was that of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which had a beneficial impact far in excess of the immediate research carried out over a relatively short time period. IGY helped to make the case that many environmental processes are global in scale and interconnected across disciplines. This program's success and public support helped set the stage for "big ecology" and the use of advanced technology in studies of ecosystem change.

A paradigm of collaborative interdisciplinary research, the International Geophysical Year (IGY) began on July 1, 1957, continuing through the end of 1958. Although billed at the time in the popular press as a virtually unprecedented global initiative, the IGY had two important predecessors: the International Polar Years of 1882–1883 and 1932–1933 (Belanger, 2006). The second Polar Year was noteworthy in providing an increased knowledge of the ionosphere. This information significantly advanced the science of radio communications (Kaplan, 1956). Unlike its two predecessors, the IGY became a global endeavor, with considerable time and effort focused on the storied high-latitude South Polar region (Fraser, 1957; Belanger, 2006).

Support for IGY was impressive from its very inception. Thus, special symposia on meteorology and geophysics were convened before the program began officially. For example, a special symposium on geophysics was held on June 28–29, 1957, foreshadowing a number of projects to be carried out during IGY (Odishaw and Ruttenberg, 1958).

Initial work coincided with the launch of Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, by the Soviet Union in October 1957, which added scientific and political impetus to carry out new geophysical research. The IGY program was a pioneer in initiating and fostering extensive international collaboration, even in the midst of the Cold War years (Sullivan, 1961). The U.S. and Canadian governments were very active in launching IGY, with significant contributions from additional governments, including those of Argentina, Australia, Britain, France, Japan, Norway, the Soviet Union, and, a little later, Belgium (Fraser, 1957). The national academies of science of the countries listed above, as well as those of several others, coordinated their efforts through the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) to make the IGY happen. Beginning in 1950, Drs. Sydney Chapman (a Briton) and Lloyd Berkner (an American) introduced the idea of the IGY to the ICSU at the headquarters in Brussels. In 1951, the Executive Board of ICSU appointed a special committee, the Comité Special de l'Année Geophysique Internationale, to coordinate the scientific planning of a worldwide cooperative program of geophysical observations (Kaplan, 1956). Numerous planning meetings occurred in the mid-1950s in Rome (1954) and in Brussels (1955), with the intention of carrying out a coordinated series of geophysical measurements in 1957–1958, designated the International Geophysical Year (IGY), when the solar fl are activity was forecast to be at a maximum (Fraser, 1957). In sum, a total of fifty-four nations collaborated in this pioneering global study (Kaplan, 1956).

The scientific legacy of the IGY is impressive. As with all well-conceived and supported programs, it provided a channel for future collaborative activity that far transcended the immediate eighteen months of the study. Because the ICSU invited the world's scientists to participate in the research program directly, and was not encumbered by governmental bureaucracies, the management overhead was very low. Thus, the international secretariat in Brussels never exceeded eight people, with the annual cost not exceeding $50,000 (Belanger, 2006). The US Congress appropriated $43.5 million for the U.S. IGY, over half of which went to the orbiting satellite effort. The technical programs received an outlay of $18.2 million, with other agencies contributing logistical support of about $400 million, making the overall investment about $500 million for the eighteen months (Belanger, 2006). More important, the U.S. Navy, as the principal logistical support for Antarctic programs, continued this role, including by the provision of aircraft and crews to fl y in hundreds of scientists per year from Christchurch, New Zealand. Over the remaining years of the twentieth century, the U.S. Navy provided logistical support to first the International Biological Program (IBP) and, more extensively, during the current, long-lived (>30 years) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Antarctic programs. LTER now has two large groups: terrestrial ecology at McMurdo station, and marine ecology at Palmer station. The latter studies are supported by the Division of Biological Sciences and the Office of Polar Programs of the U.S. National Science Foundation. The historical role of the U.S. Navy dates from the Antarctic exploration days of Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who had considerable support during the 1930s to carry out exploration and climatological research on the continent.

The role of national pride and desire to be present "at the table" of ongoing research has certainly played a significant role in fostering continued support of scientific research in the Antarctic. For more extensive background on this complex interface between politics and science, see the later chapters in Belanger (2006).

THE EMERGENCE OF ECOSYSTEM SCIENCE

Ecosystem science per se arose contemporaneously with Eugene Odum's textbook (1953). Arising as the fruits of collaboration of E. P. Odum with his younger brother Howard Tom Odum (Craige, 2001), this textbook took a holistic ecosystem-oriented approach that was a marked departure from earlier ecology textbooks. It was issued in several editions, the latest revised in 2005 (Odum and Barrett, 2005). This book was the principal text in ecology for several decades from the 1950s to the 1980s (Golley, 1993). An interesting and seldom-read precedent for ecosystem scientists was set by Alfred J. Lotka, whose book (1925, 1956) on physical aspects of biology, including energetics and energy transformations, inspired early ecosystem ecologists.

The Atomic Energy Commission and Ecosystem Science

For the first thirty years after Arthur Tansley's promulgation of an initial ecosystem concept (1935) onward, ecosystem science was very much a "cottage industry" of a major professor and associated apprenticing graduate student(s) writing papers for a small number of ecology journals. Ecology and ecosystem studies' progression arose out of a series of synergistic events that propelled the field along at a very rapid pace in the 1950s and 1960s. The development of "big science" really took off in the World War II years, between 1942 and 1945. In that short span of time, the Manhattan Project, as the atomic bomb project was called, was developed, with major research groups active at the University of Chicago, Los Alamos National Laboratory (New Mexico), and the large production facilities of Oak Ridge (Tennessee) and Hanford (Washington). The ultrasecret project involved many thousands of scientists and technicians in a colossally large (for the time) expenditure of $2 billion.

From 1945 to 1950, new federal funding sources for research, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), were established (Appel, 2000). This significantly increased funding in all aspects of basic scientific research, including ecology. A continuing growth of atomic energy and "peaceful uses of the atom" occurred from 1955 onward. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) seemed to be rather casual initially about the rapid spread of radioisotopes and radiation contaminants in the environment at its production facilities. One of the leading community ecologists of the time, Professor Orlando Park of Northwestern University, was asked by Dr. Edward Struxness, a mid-level administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, to advise on the possible spread of radionuclides in the environment. Park came to Oak Ridge, talked to scientists in the Health Physics Division, and observed the accumulation of radionuclides, e.g. 137Cesium, in a large drainage area, the White Oak Lake bed just a couple of miles from the main reactor areas.

Professor Park, when asked how to rectify the problem, urged Oak Ridge to hire fifty Ph.D.-level scientists immediately, to tackle such a large problem. Upon being informed that no more than two could be hired, he quickly recommended one of his recent Ph.D. students, Stanley Auerbach, an animal ecologist who specialized in invertebrate ecology, to set up a research program in radiation ecology (D. A. Crossley Jr., pers. comm.). Auerbach proceeded to develop a research team of young aspiring researchers to monitor the spread of radionuclides in the environment, and also to conduct studies on ecosystem dynamics of the grassland, forest, and aquatic ecosystems on the Oak Ridge reservation (Bocking, 1997). The first new hires were Charles Rohde, an acarologist, followed by D. A. "Dac" Crossley Jr., a newly minted Ph.D. from Kansas University Entomology Department, followed by Paul Dunaway, a mammalogist (D. A. Crossley Jr., pers. comm.). Thus a major impetus to ecosystem research came from a demonstrated need identified by the scientific community, and acted upon by a funding agency, to better understand the dynamics of ecosystem processes and to track rates of uptake by environmental processes. In so doing, "radio-ecological" tracers became a new tool for conducting ecosystem research at multiple scales. Radiation effects on organisms were reported in early studies of Auerbach (1958) on the survival of mites and Collembola after exposure to radiation from 60Cobalt. The AEC provided both the concern (nuclear) and the tools (radiotracers) to study the fates and effects on ecosystems. The AEC was in the business of ecosystem studies before the NSF, as a result of the leadership of John Wolfe, who came from Ohio State University, where he had studied the microclimate of the Neotoma woods (David E. Reichle, pers. comm.). This included long-term studies at Rock Valley, Nevada, and the eruption of the Surtsey volcano in Iceland, and primary succession occurring on it (James MacMahon, pers. comm.). Stan Auerbach's group's unique contributions included use of radiotracers at ecosystem scales (Drs. Olson, Crossley, Reichle, and Witkamp), emphasis on systems ecology (Drs. Olson, Van Dyne, Patten, and O'Neill) and emphasis on bioinformatics to support the models. Two biome directors are in the above names, and are considered in detail in Chapter 2.

Nearly contemporaneously with this development, Eugene Odum was approached by AEC officials in 1951 to study ecosystems on the Savannah River reservation, a large 315 mi2 (504 km2) area set aside in western South Carolina along the Savannah River to produce plutonium and tritium for use in hydrogen bombs. Odum offered to conduct a wide-ranging study of the structure and functioning of ecosystems, asking for close to $100,000 per year. The AEC started with an initial grant of $7,000 per year for the research of one lead PI (Odum) and one graduate student. The program grew rapidly to include several senior staff members and technicians at the Laboratory for Radiation Ecology, soon renamed the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (SREL). They made use of the ready availability of radioisotopes to study metabolism of animals, and also effects of radiation on organisms and entire forest stands (Golley, 2001). Odum hired Frank Golley, a newly minted Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1958, and put him to work as the first director of SREL two years later (Smith et al., 2001).

Other environmental research groups were established at the Pacific Northwest laboratories at Hanford (Washington), Brookhaven (on Long Island), New York, and Los Alamos (New Mexico) laboratories. These programs transformed funding and how ecological science was conducted in the 1960s onward. The research groups tended to emphasize team research aimed at interdisciplinary studies of the movement of radionuclides in ecosystems and the effects of radiation on organisms in their habitats as well. A series of volumes on Radioecology were produced in the 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., Schultz and Klement, 1961; Nelson, 1971). By 1971, total funding for environmental, biological and technical studies in the AEC was $72 million, with about $34 million in the Division of Biology and Medicine (Larson, 1971). The total funding for ecology and ecosystem studies in the National Science Foundation totaled somewhat less than $20 million that year, making an interesting comparison of very different levels of resource allocation at that time for ecosystem research. Arriving at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1965, I began using radionuclides to tag food items in the field, to further study microbial and faunal food webs. To gain the information and expertise necessary to carry out this work, Dick Wiegert, an invertebrate ecologist, and Frank Golley, two major researchers at the SREL encouraged me to go to "the source of knowledge," D. A. ("Dac") Crossley Jr., in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Having read several of his papers (Crossley 1963; Reichle and Crossley, 1965), I inquired if he would be willing to tutor me in a one-on-one short course in radioecology. Dac invited me to visit him in October 1965, and we spent a few days on a short tutorial concerning the mathematical calculations of biological half-lives, isotope counting methods, and so forth. He provided an overview of what he covered in a two-week short course in four days. I was very impressed at how much could be done by such a talented and focused person, all of this presented with a wonderfully dry sense of humor. I also met Jerry Olson, Dave Reichle, Stan Auerbach (head of the Division), Martin Witkamp, and several other colleagues. At this point, additional publications such as Witkamp and Crossley (1966) were in press, and I discussed their findings with them.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from Big Ecology by David C. Coleman Copyright © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................vii
Acknowledgments....................xi
Chapter 1. Intellectual Antecedents to Large-Scale Ecosystem Studies....................1
Chapter 2. How the International Biological Program Swept the Scientific World....................15
Chapter 3. The Origin and Evolution of the Long-Term Ecological Research Program....................89
Chapter 4. The Future of Big Ecology: IGBP, AmeriFlux, NEON, and Other Major Initiatives....................145
References....................185
Index....................215

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"Coleman offers his personal, inside account of ecosystem science evolution over 40 years, including the influence of individual scientists. .. . Ecologists should read this book for its insights into the foundations on which present-day ecosystem science is built."—Choice

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