INTERNATIONAL ECOLOGY DEBATE

ANdiNA VII

Logarska Dolina, Slovenia

9-13 June 2025

The challenge

Ecology and its allied disciplines (social sciences, economics) are rife with cross-scale challenges in understanding the drivers of ecological patterns and dynamics and implementing ecological knowledge to deter the biodiversity crisis. While the tension between induction (inference from the particular and local to the global) and deduction (inference from the general to the local) has preoccupied ecologists for decades, this debate can easily be juxtaposed onto the current state of conservation, where there is often a mismatch between global conservation goals and local action. For example, the Global Biodiversity Framework supplied ambitious targets for biodiversity conservation and developed monitoring frameworks to assess whether these targets are met, which requires both global understanding of drivers of biodiversity change, as well as on-the-ground knowledge and implementation. The twin pursuits of understanding and predicting ecological phenomena on one hand and their preservation on the other further requires the effective flow of expertise and knowledge not just across scales, but across disciplines. So far, progress toward these goals has been hampered by a number of structural and cultural factors, both internal and external to science. This includes, for instance, socioeconomic factors that bias sampling and experimentation to just a few places on Earth. We contend that the next stage of advancement in ecology and conservation will require breaking down barriers that prevent the flow of knowledge across scales both within and between ecology and practice.

Across continents and biomes, practitioners on the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis face an absence of unified venues for data sharing, a lack of basic information on most species, and insufficient access to best management practices that have been developed elsewhere. Together, these factors make collaboration difficult and slow the dissemination of relevant  knowledge and solutions among practitioners facing similar environmental challenges. While recent decades have seen the rapid development and spread of open science principles in academic ecology, the resulting databases and repositories now reflect worldwide economic imbalances rather than the full breadth of ecological phenomena. For example, most “global” studies assessing biodiversity patterns have data concentrated in North America and Europe where funding for ecological research is less scarce, thus failing to depict the entirety of ecological patterns. Finally, the gap might be even wider between ecological research and practice, with the theoretical advances produced by research taking too long to be incorporated into practice, the generated data by research not tackling the actual needs of practice, and even mismatches between the scales which theory and practice are looking into the problem.

While researchers have been focusing on technological ways of generating data faster and to model what we do not know, some issues need to be tackled by bridging the disconnect within ecological research and practice that result in fragmented efforts and sub-optimal outcomes. While previous conferences and papers have raised various issues, debate is needed to identify effective solutions. Can locally-relevant conservation generate data that are relevant to the advancement of ecology at the global scale? What are the barriers to the incorporation of cutting-edge scientific insight into global conservation practice? What role do incentives play in perpetuating mismatches between scales and disciplines? Addressing these and other questions, this workshop aims to identify practical steps for aligning the goals of researchers and practitioners in ecology with how they do ecology. 

Potential outputs

1. A framework in which ecological research and practice can tackle their different goals together, unifying approaches from data gathering to their respective products, including cross-scale activities (from global priorities to on the ground activities);
2. Identification of better partitions of labor for creating meaningful and effective collaborations between scientists and practitioners (or between scientists among themselves).
3. Assessment and identification of institutional policies (journal-level? government-level?) and individual actions that could support integrating data from different sources and formats into a unified view.
4. A pragmatic approach to ecological knowledge production coming from greater interaction with decision makers and civil society; what are the pathways and challenges for doing this? Would this be effective?
5. An exploration of alternative frameworks to data collection, such as decision science, to achieve more effective management outcomes.

---

Join us