Problems in funding biological conservation research

REPLY TO: 20 Jul 2024: https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~krebs/ecological_rants/problems-in-funding-biological-conservation-research/

I am neither a good ecologist nor a good environmentalist. But this is about research funding and conservation, so bear with me.

My wife and I enjoy walks around Deer Lake. If somebody were to ask me "Why are there so many mallards but so few wood ducks?", all I could do is some handwaving. It's survival and reproduction, it's the niche, it's all very complicated. I know, I know. Coexistence is one result of the Lotka-Volterra competition model (1), but to ask Platt's famous question (2): "But [Madam or] Sir, what experiment would disprove your hypothesis?" Causality is hard to establish in the historical sciences (3).

I am also not sure about conservation. As I have asked before (4): Why is biodiversity worth protecting? More than that. When I see the family-tent-sized rubber sheets rolled out around Deer Lake to combat the invasion of the yellow flag iris, I wonder how well these rubber sheets work. Looking at the sizeable populations next to the rubber sheets, my response is: Not well. 

Of course, you may say I am an idiot, and indeed I know very little. But if we cannot come up with good explanations for the abundance and the distribution of organisms, if the only reasons for protecting biodiversity we can name are vague notions of ecosystem stability and aesthetics, if the outcomes of our conservation efforts are uncertain at best and pathetic at worst, and if the timescales governing our objects of interest is decades to centuries, it is half a miracle that we do get funding at all.  

The question is this: How can we convince the average citizen that ecological research is important? (5)

I am not sure if education is the answer. I teach ecology and evolution at a fourth-rate university. I do have students who think that humans are the cause for the extinction of dinosaurs, a belief that would have gotten me thrown out of middle school. And a couple of months ago, I visited the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at U.B.C. with four questions in mind (4): How much biodiversity is out there? Why are there so many species, or why are there so few? Why is biodiversity worth protecting? How should we manage biodiversity? The only question that was somewhat answered is the first.

But maybe I am expecting too much from us humans. 

(An afterthought: When I was a postdoc at U.B.C. in the late 1990s, I dreamt of an independent research institute for ecology (6), where researchers could focus on hypotheses and evidence. I even imagined the funding. Not from the public, because it requires the writing of grant proposals that may not get funded and the publishing of papers that nobody reads. Not from "philanthropists", because it may require sycophancy, compromise, and possibly hypocrisy (7). The funding I envisioned was achieved through -- hold on to your seats -- sports betting. If we are as good at data analysis as we think we are, this should be a piece of cake. I even trained an artificial neural network on about a thousand baseball games. The trouble was that it never converged.)

NOTES AND REFERENCES

(1) C. J. Krebs (2009), Ecology (Sixth Edition).

(2) J. R. Platt (1964), Strong Inference. Science 146: 347 - 353.

(3) My comment on https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~krebs/ecological_rants/the-two-ecologies/.

(4) My comment on https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~krebs/ecological_rants/biodiversity-science/.

(5) If the average citizen is not convinced, the average politician will not act. That said, it is still a mystery to me how the physicists get their particle accelerators or the astronomers their space telescopes. 

(6) What the Institute for Advanced Study used to be to mathematics, the Santa Fe Institute to complex adaptive systems, the Oregon Research Institute to psychology.

(7) Who would you NOT accept money from?