Andrew Dobson (editor) - Unsolved Problems in Ecology

1. Andrew Dobson, Robert D. Holt, and David Tilman
2. xvii
3. Elizabeth T. Borer
4. Emilie C. Snell-Rood and Megan E. Kobiela
5. Marcel Holyoak and William C. Wetzel
6. C. Jessica E. Metcalf and Julien F. Ayroles
7. Andrew Dobson
8. Robert M. May
9. Egbert Giles Leigh Jr.
10. Robert D. Holt
11. Tim Coulson
12. Christina Riehl
13. Peter J. Grubb
14. Johnathan M. Levine and Simon P. Hart
15. Andrew R Tilman and David Tilman
16. Pablo A. Marquet, Mauricio Tejo, and Rolando Rebolledo
17. Mercedes Pascual
18. Ian Hatton
19. Michel Loreau
20. Robert M. Pringle
21. Helene C. Muller-Landau and Stephen W. Pacala
22. Diana H. Wall and Ross A. Virginia
23. Andrew F. Read
24. Michael E. Hochberg
25. Simon Levin
26. Tim Caro
27. Rachael Winfree
28. Kevin Lafferty
29. Stefano Allesina

Andrew Dobson, Robert D. Holt, and David Tilman

The centenary of the Ecological Society of America inspired us to ask ecologists their thoughts about the next century, specifically on the broad question of What are the Unsolved Problems in Ecology? We imagined that they might identify two classes of problems: (1) Those people have wrestled with, but where solutions have remained elusive and (2) problems that someone may have just recognized as being potentially huge yet unexamined. The motivation for the book stems from a deep conviction that ecology will be a central defining science of the twenty-first century, just as physics defined the twentieth, and chemistry the nineteeth. Consequently, we put our authors in the position of defining what they think the key agenda for ecology will be within their area of research for the next decades to a full century. Sutherland et al. (2013) honored the centenary of the British Ecological Society by compiling a list of key unanswered questionsin effect, a series of bullet points aiming at future progress in the discipline. We, instead, asked authors to provide a more discursive reflection on open, important questions in the form of essays, providing a more expansive vista across possible future intellectual landscapes.

A strong motivation for the book was a previous volume of essays published in the 1970s that simply asked What are the unsolved problems for the 20th Century (Duncan and Weston-Smith 1977); there were only two biological chapters, including one by John Maynard Smith, who astutely pointed out that we did not know why sex had evolved. Curious as it seems, no one had explicitly realized that this was a problem prior to Maynard Smiths explication of the inherent cost of sex (1971, 1977; see Bell 1982); although Darwin as early as 1862 presciently remarked we do not even in the least know why new beings should be produced by the union of two sexual elements, instead of by parthenogenesis (cited in Kirk 2006), and Bonner (1958) and others do adumbrate some aspects of the issue. This book chapter helped spark the genesis of a whole subdiscipline of studies within evolution, behavioral ecology, and epidemiology. We are ambitious enough to hope that at least one of our chapters in this volume can likewise unearth an intellectual goldmine that transforms thinking within ecology and the broader disciplines of evolution and environmental science. The other biological essay in the 1977 compilation was by Peter Grubb, who pointed out that our knowledge of leaf structure and function at the time was woefully inadequate. This chapter also led to multiple developments in plant physiology and ecology. We were delighted when Peter accepted our invitation to write a chapter for the current book, and doubly so, when he decided to write a chapter that describes how much we still need to know about leaf structure and function, some four decades after his initial distillation of this question.

Some unsolved questions that the authors in this volume bring up are radically new, but others are longstanding. Robert MacArthur towards the end of his life sketched an array of outstanding problems in ecology (MacArthur 1972), focused around the theme of species coexistence, many of which are still with us and touched on in the current volume, including for instance the need for network perspectives, and the importance of understanding why are some species able to adjust niche widths rapidly when put in a new situation while others are rigid?; the latter question foreshadowed current concerns with themes such as niche conservatism and evolutionary rescue. MacArthur argued for intellectual pluralism and suggested that ecologists needed to get beyond the biological sciences (including in particular, he notes, the earth sciences) to really come to grips with the issue of species coexistence. These insights resonate today.

We initially planned to obtain three temporal perspectives on the unsolved problems identified by the authors, corresponding roughly to different stages in the trajectories of careers. To this end, we split the set of authors we invited into three broad and overlapping categories: (1) We asked younger researchers whose careers are expanding rapidly as to what they see as the major conceptual challenges facing their research, (2) we asked midcareer scientists to describe what they plan to focus on as the major targets of opportunity in their own careers, and (3) we asked individuals who have helped to define the study of ecology over the last 30 to 50 years to describe the problems they have found intractable or continually challenging, given available techniques and methodology. The skeleton of this structure is faintly discernible within the chapters we received for the final volume, although we perceive two distortions, one of which can fairly readily be dealt with, the other of which presents a significant unsolved problem in ecology. The first distortion is that we tended to ask people whom we knew personally to write chapters. Although we have all been active in the Ecological Society of America, the British Ecological Society, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society for Conservation Biology (among others) for more than 30 years, we surely (if unconsciously) are biased in asking friends and colleagues, rather than a broader array of people we may have admired from a distance in these and other ecological societies. This is partly because it is so much easier to pressure and cajole friends and colleagues to deliver manuscripts and forebear with us when the editorial process slows down.