Craven Dylan, Winter Marten, Hotzel Konstantin, Gaikwad Jitendra, Eisenhauer Nico, Hohmuth Martin, König-Ries Birgitta, Wirth Christian
Biodiversity Macroecology & Biogeography, Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.
Ecol Evol. 2019 Jul 4;9(12):6744-6755. doi: 10.1002/ece3.5244. Epub 2019 Jun 10.
The study of biodiversity has grown exponentially in the last thirty years in response to demands for greater understanding of the function and importance of Earth's biodiversity and finding solutions to conserve it. Here, we test the hypothesis that biodiversity science has become more interdisciplinary over time. To do so, we analyze 97,945 peer-reviewed articles over a twenty-two-year time period (1990-2012) with a continuous time dynamic model, which classifies articles into concepts (i.e., topics and ideas) based on word co-occurrences. Using the model output, we then quantify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: concept diversity, that is, the diversity of topics and ideas across subdisciplines in biodiversity science, subdiscipline diversity, that is, the diversity of subdisciplines across concepts, and network structure, which captures interactions between concepts and subdisciplines. We found that, on average, concept and subdiscipline diversity in biodiversity science were either stable or declining, patterns which were driven by the persistence of rare concepts and subdisciplines and a decline in the diversity of common concepts and subdisciplines, respectively. Moreover, our results provide evidence that conceptual homogenization, that is, decreases in temporal β concept diversity, underlies the observed trends in interdisciplinarity. Together, our results reveal that biodiversity science is undergoing a dynamic phase as a scientific discipline that is consolidating around a core set of concepts. Our results suggest that progress toward addressing the biodiversity crisis via greater interdisciplinarity during the study period may have been slowed by extrinsic factors, such as the failure to invest in research spanning across concepts and disciplines. However, recent initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) may attract broader support for biodiversity-related issues and hence interdisciplinary approaches to address scientific, political, and societal challenges in the coming years.
在过去三十年里，随着人们对地球生物多样性的功能和重要性有更深入理解以及寻找保护生物多样性方法的需求不断增加，生物多样性研究呈指数级增长。在此，我们检验生物多样性科学随着时间推移变得更加跨学科这一假设。为此，我们使用连续时间动态模型分析了1990年至2012年这二十二年间97945篇经过同行评审的文章，该模型根据词共现情况将文章分类为概念（即主题和观点）。然后，利用模型输出结果，我们量化跨学科性的不同方面：概念多样性，即生物多样性科学各子学科中主题和观点的多样性；子学科多样性，即跨概念的子学科多样性；以及网络结构，它捕捉概念与子学科之间的相互作用。我们发现，平均而言，生物多样性科学中的概念和子学科多样性要么稳定要么下降，这些模式分别由稀有概念和子学科的持续存在以及常见概念和子学科多样性的下降所驱动。此外，我们的结果提供了证据表明概念同质化，即时间β概念多样性的减少，是跨学科性观察到的趋势的基础。总体而言，我们的结果表明，生物多样性科学作为一门科学学科正在经历一个动态阶段，正围绕一组核心概念进行巩固。我们的结果表明，在研究期间，通过更大程度的跨学科性来应对生物多样性危机的进展可能因外部因素而放缓，比如未能投资于跨越概念和学科的研究。然而，近期诸如生物多样性和生态系统服务政府间科学政策平台（IPBES）等举措可能会吸引对生物多样性相关问题更广泛的支持，并因此在未来几年吸引跨学科方法来应对科学、政治和社会挑战。
