Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
PLoS One. 2013 Apr 24;8(4):e59813. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059813. Print 2013.
It is thought that the science of ecology has experienced conceptual shifts in recent decades, chiefly from viewing nature as static and balanced to a conception of constantly changing, unpredictable, complex ecosystems. Here, we ask if these changes are reflected in actual ecological research over the last 30 years. We surveyed 750 articles from the entire pool of ecological literature and 750 articles from eight leading journals. Each article was characterized according to its type, ecological domain, and applicability, and major topics. We found that, in contrast to its common image, ecology is still mostly a study of single species (70% of the studies); while ecosystem and community studies together comprise only a quarter of ecological research. Ecological science is somewhat conservative in its topics of research (about a third of all topics changed significantly through time), as well as in its basic methodologies and approaches. However, the growing proportion of problem-solving studies (from 9% in the 1980s to 20% in the 2000 s) may represent a major transition in ecological science in the long run.
据认为，近几十年来，生态学这门科学经历了概念上的转变，主要是从将自然视为静态和平衡的观念转变为不断变化、不可预测、复杂的生态系统的概念。在这里，我们想知道这些变化是否反映在过去 30 年的实际生态学研究中。我们调查了来自整个生态学文献库的 750 篇文章和 8 种主要期刊的 750 篇文章。每篇文章都根据其类型、生态领域和适用性以及主要主题进行了描述。我们发现，与普遍的印象相反，生态学仍然主要是对单一物种的研究（70%的研究）；而生态系统和群落研究仅占生态研究的四分之一。生态学在其研究主题（所有主题中有三分之一随着时间的推移发生了显著变化）以及基本方法和方法上有些保守。然而，解决问题的研究比例不断增加（从 20 世纪 80 年代的 9%增加到 20 世纪 20 年代的 20%），从长远来看，这可能代表着生态学科学的重大转变。
