Supporting material
Appendix S1. A list of the 754 submitted questions.
Those who were consulted and provided questions include Steve Marcelo Aizen,
Tiffany Aslam, Mark Auliya, Sandro Azaele, Avi Bar-Massada, Patty Balvanera, Lior
Blank, Ute Bradter, Judie Bronstein, Rob Brooker, Yvonne Buckley, Harald Bugman,
Tom Cameron, Scott Chamberlain, Jo Clark, Erika Crispo, Chris Dickman, Carsten
Dormann, Alison Dunn, Liz Elliot, Rampal Etienne, Dan Flynn, Enric Frago, Gregoire
Freschet, Stephan Gale, Michael Gundale, Richard Gunton, Michael Gerisch, Richard
German, Sofia Gripenberg, Camille Guilbaud, Kyle Harms, Laura Harrison, John Healey,
Mark Hebblewhite, Klaus Henle, Joe Hicks, Steven Higgins, Joaquin Hortal, Etienne
Laliberte, Jan Leps, Jonathan Levine, Tom de Luca, Chris Lortie, Neal Hockley, Mike
Hutchings, Hans Jacquemyn, Karin Johst, Laurence Jones, Kat Jones, Micael Jonsson,
Hans Kasperidus, Reinhard Klenke, Roger Kouyos, Robert May, Jason Matthiopoulos,
Jessica Metcalf, Sean McMahon, Shai Meiri, Katrin Meyer, Rebecca Morris, Rosmarie
Müller, Marie-Charlotte Nilsson, Tim Paine, Guy Pe’er, Will Pearse, Nathalie Pettorelli,
Avi Perevolotzky, Alex Pigot, Marco Plebani, Janielle Porter, Trevor Price, Simon
Rowe, Rob Salguero-Gomez, Santiago Saura,Martin Schädler, Boris Schröder, Alexander
Singer, Eleanor Slade, Phil Stephens, Maja Sundqvist, Jeremy Thomas, Rebecca TierLange, Johan du Toit, Jason Tylianakis, Jun-Ichirou Suzuki, Marie Vanderwalle, Ciska
Veen, Rebeca Velazquez, Steve Votier, Mark Whittingham, Kerstin Wiegand, Kathy
Willis and Tobias Zust.
1.
There’s a lot of talk about eco-evolutionary feedbacks now. But how fast can they
happen?
2.
What evolves first, a specialist or a generalist?
3.
Will the breakdown of biogeographical barriers slow or accelerate the evolution of
new species?
4.
How does phenotypic plasticity interact with environmental pressures to influence
evolution?
5.
Does indeed nothing make sense in evolution except in the light of ecology? Or vice
versa?
1
6.
Functional traits: can one predict evolutionary pressures based on puntual
measurements of functional traits?
7.
Is there any signal of microevolutionary change at the level of communities or
ecosystems?
8.
Is evolutionary suicide more than interesting theory?
9.
Under what circumstances will evolutionary change keep pace with environmental
change?
10.
Is the evolution of competitive dominance actually rather common? (thinking of
monodominants like giant sequoias, humans, tree climax species in general... that
only seem to be knocked back by major climatic disturbances or pathogens?)
11.
To what extent are insect species adapted to their local biotic or abiotic
environments at regional or landscape scales?
12.
Is there a general theory of scaling? And how can we find it?
13.
How local is adaptation?
14.
Studies on scaling laws: they seem to ignore history and assume that species are
interchangeable. Is this the best we can do?
15.
As genetic studies are increasing with ever more sophisticated tools, it is likely that
the uncovering of cryptic/new diversity and even cryptic/new species will be
increasing - how do these new discoveries impact on our understanding and
evaluation of biodiversity?
16.
Senescence: how universal is senescence? Under which habitat do senescence rates
slow down (or even go negative?). Is there phylogenetic inertia for senescence
patterns? Does the internal organization of modular organism predict which species
undergo/escape senescence?
17.
How important are genetic and epigenetic diversity for adaptation to environmental
variation?
18.
What is the ecological significance of epigenetic variation?
19.
What are the relative influences of genetics, epigenetics and non-genetic processes
on phenotypes?
20.
What is the ecological importance of epigenetic variation?
21.
What aspects of the biotic and abiotic environment lead to epigenetic variation?
22.
Which phenotypic traits are subject to epigenetic variation?
23.
What maintains consistent individual differences (personality) in animal
behaviour?/Is variability in behaviour a strategy?
2
24.
What are the magnitudes and causes of inbreeding preferences in nature?
25.
What is the physiological basis of life-history trade-offs?
26.
Why do closely related species often exhibit very different amounts of intraspecific
variability?
27.
Why can't we find evidence of the cost of phenotypic plasticity?
28.
Why do most species have stage-structured life cycles?
29.
Why are there no genes for stochasticity (plasticity) in phenotype?
30.
Does genomics have a role in ecology?
31.
What is the value of genetic capital?
32.
Is there red-queen hypothesis for environmental change and evolution – running to
stand still?
33.
How fast can evolution proceed in a changing and variable environment?
34.
Does molecular detail alter or overturn predictions from ecological and life history
theory; or is it just more natural history for the ecologist?
35.
Does molecular insight into the mode and rate of trait evolution change ecological
theory?
36.
What ecological and genetic factors constrain evolution in a changing and variable
environment?
37.
How does phylogeny alter our interpretation of morphology, physiology and
ecology?
38.
What cues do organisms use to determine their phenology?
39.
When does local adaptation lead to speciation?
40.
Do species concepts matter?
41.
How many of the described morphospecies are functionally distinct?
42.
How do you define a species?
43.
Do we need an ecological understanding of molecular systems?
44.
What is the role of the epigenome in phenotypic plasticity? Can the capacity to
utilise epigenetic mechanisms make some species more “adaptable” than others?
45.
How has the Evolution of sex occurred?
46.
How do animals compete for resources? This is important as it is the process that
drives the unequal distribution of resources and thus natural selection, however, the
current explanations in all behavioural ecology texts is fundamentally flawed.
3
47.
In a world of increasing international interconnectedness, will eukaryotes
increasingly follow the microbial rule: everything is everywhere but the
environment selects?
48.
Do southern hemisphere plants have more conservative traits than those in the
northern hemisphere?
49.
Does the rate of succession and the spatial distribution of vegetation differ between
climatically similar areas because of the available biota (e.g. animal dispersers)?
50.
Can fields of farmed saltmarsh, mangrove, seagrass replicate, equal or increase the
ecological productivity on the same area of natural coastal complex?
51.
What geographical and environmental features shape connectivity among riverine
networks?
52.
What are the consequences of the Bering strait opening up?
53.
What will be the impacts of the more permanent opening of the north passage?
54.
Are corridors always important for the distribution and abundance of animals and
plants, or does the importance of corridors vary widely in different landscapes?
55.
To what extent do the low dispersal rates found in many European insects and
plants reflect historical adaptations to the availability and dynamics of species’
habitat-patches under defunct anthropogenic forms of land management?
56.
Will the breakdown of biogeographical barriers lead to sustained increases in local
diversity?
57.
To what extent do dispersal traits currently limit the connectivity of fragmented
habitats?
58.
What is the impact of landscape structure on movement (dispersal), connectivity,
and population dynamics? (This is related to the older question about the relative
impact of habitat loss vs. fragmentation which is still unsettled, but revitalized in the
current context of range shifts under climate change)
59.
What are the costs of dispersal?
60.
How important is habitat connectivity for successful dispersal and population
persistence?
61.
What is the heritability/genetic basis of dispersal and movement behaviour?
62.
What is the degree of within-individual and among-individual consistency and
variation in seasonal movements and locations?
63.
What rules shape the development of locations and movements?
4
64.
What type of information do real animals use to make dispersal and foraging
decisions and how do they process it in relation to its value?
65.
How do environmental conditions (meteorological or oceanographic) impact the
costs of animal movement?
66.
To what extent does morphology constrain animal distributions?
67.
Where do wide-ranging large marine animals (e.g. cetaceans, turtles, etc.) come
from and where are they going? How do we describe the spatial connectivity for
organisms that have the potential for wide dispersal?
68.
What cues drive migration and will those cues change in response to differential
rates of change on species' breeding and non-breeding grounds?
69.
Is Levy flight the most suitable model to underpin analysis of animal movement
trajectories ?
70.
Seeds that disperse very long distances or survive in the soil for a very long time
represent the tail of the distribution. Is this tail dominated by seeds with particular
traits, or simply by seeds that happen to be the most abundant (and thus inevitably
the smallest)?
71.
Is the persistence of species assemblages in fragmented landscapes driven by
dynamical extinction-recolonisation equilibria?
72.
How do climatic conditions (past and present) affect the ability of animals to fly?
73.
Is dispersal the key to persistence under intense habitat fragmentation and shifting
climatic conditions? If so, how do we model/study dispersal in organisms that range
in size from pollen to top predators?
74.
What are the effects of fragmentation on the evolution of morphology and
demography of species?
75.
How do anthropogenic changes to land cover affect dispersal and migration
patterns?
76.
We argue over what is an appropriate ecological unit for a particular study, yet we
all agree that such things don't exist. Under what framework can we link processes
at a smaller scale (e.g. dispersal limitation) into a wider scale (e.g. range size)?
77.
Is it possible to infer the dispersal range from traits?
78.
What is dispersal?
79.
While theory predicts that species should go extinct under certain fragmentation and
isolation thresholds, this does not seem to be the case. What allows them not to go
extinct then?
5
80.
What are the contributions of biogeographical factors and historical contingencies in
determining present day ecological processes?
81.
How can models of species distribution (e.g. resource selection functions) be
successful at predicting distribution under changing environmental conditions?
82.
How can we find a general mechanistic understanding of distribution patterns and
range dynamics?
83.
After accounting for all confounding variables, do invasive alien species have
different traits from those of native and non-invasive alien species?
84.
Are there general traits or variables to predict why some alien species are invasive?
85.
How long does it take for an invasive species to become a native species?
86.
When does biological invasion matter?
87.
Which traits promote plant invasiveness
88.
Are there thresholds of occupancy beyond which efforts to control invasive species
(e.g. weeds) are ineffective, and, if so, what are they?
89.
Can we identify characteristics of likely problematic invasive species?
90.
Can we predict whether a species will become invasive in new
habitats/environmental change by evaluating its capacity for adaptive evolution?
91.
If a species is trying to invade and the area already presents congenerics, does it
make invasion more or less likely?
92.
How do individual dispersal traits affect invasions?
93.
Will invasive species eventually become naturalized or integrated into local
communities with reduced impacts?
94.
Are patterns of biogeography and diversity similar across taxonomic groups?
95.
Where do we draw the line between naturalized vs invasive species? At what point
does a former invasive become integral to the functioning of the ecosystem?
96.
Have we been studying uninformative patterns in ecology? For instance, speciesabundance distributions, species-area curves, body size patterns.
97.
If habitat diversity drives the Species-Area relationship in many cases, why does
habitat diversity itself scale so consistently with area?
98.
What controls spatial variation in speciation and extinction rates?
99.
What is the feedback between diversity and diversification?
100. How do range margins evolve and what determines them?
101. How does climate/latitude/elevation influence range margins?
6
102. Is there a synoptic model of global patterns of biodiversity? (Maintained at the
Institute for Global Biodiversity Simulation, of course).
103. What observable variables can be used to assess the distance of a population from a
“tipping-point” beyond which it is in jeopardy of extinction?
104. Can we accurately predict the “extinction debt” from the loss and fragmentation of
natural habitats, and can we find ways to forestall paying it off?
105. Which native woody species should be planted, and how, to satisfactorily restore
degraded land and reintegrate forest fragments in the Asian tropics and subtropics?
106. How do we establish if jellyfish are taking over perturbed marine systems ?
107. Can we infer process from pattern? One of the fundamental issues in ecology is that
the dynamics generally operate over time-scale that are much longer than grant
income, or even academic careers. Therefore the types of long time-series necessary
are often difficult to obtain -- however, in principle the current state of the
population and its spatial pattern may tell us something about the underlying
processes.
108. Can we resolve the relationship between dispersal and the distribution of adaptive
variation and its impact on meta-communities?
109. Did most rare and narrow-niche species reach their currently few remote and
isolated locations via extremely rare and improbable dispersal events, or are they
typically remnants of once-relatively-continuous distributions?
110. What is the effect of fragmentation on taxa that operate at specific scales?
111. What is the effect of fragmentation on biodiversity?
112. How important is (habitat) heterogeneity for understanding the distribution of
species at local and larger scales?
113. What determines natural treelines?
114. How, and how strongly, does long-distance migration link otherwise separate
ecosystems?
115. How long does it take species geographic distributions to equilibrate with climate?
116. What maintains species range margins?
117. What are the typical spatial scales over which behavioural and population processes
operate in insects, and do they vary systematically for different guilds and trophic
levels?
118. How much information is buried in spatial patterns with respect to the underlying
processes and how can we extract this information?
7
119. How important are offspring sex ratios as drivers of population dynamics?
120. Vole cycles – why did they disappear and now seem to reappear?
121. Multiple stable states and irreversibility are understudies. Specifically, does
biodiversity protect against flips to the less desirable state?
122. What determines the relative importance of direct and indirect effects of
environmental change on population dynamics?
123. How coarsely can we consider density dependence while still predicting future
population dynamics accurately?
124. Demography: how does belowground population dynamics affect aboveground
population dynamics?
125. How can we disentangle the effects of the environment, internal processes of
population dynamics, and stochasticity on observed species distribution patterns?
126. Do observed population trajectories reflect equilibria or transient dynamics? Do the
transient population dynamics observed in mathematical models occur rarely, often,
or ubiquitously in real populations?
127. Is the tempo of natural selection on genes affecting fitness and demography
sufficient to cause instability in population dynamics (Chitty 1954 revisited!)?
128. To what degree does genetic variation influence population dynamics and
persistence and over what timescales?
129. Do different demographic rates vary over different spatial scales, and how do they
then combine to influence spatio-temporal population dynamics?
130. How do disturbances influence population dynamics of species with different lifehistory strategies?
131. How does isolation affect population dynamics and persistence?
132. How are population dynamics and evolutionary dynamics linked?
133. Do most organisms live near their physiological limits?
134. Can we predict species interactions based on phylogenetic relatedness, and do how
do similarities in species traits correlate with phylogenetic relatedness?
135. What is the ecological significance of adaptive genetic diversity?
136. How do species interactions and abiotic constraints interact to determine the
distribution of species?
137. What is the relative role of biotic and abiotic processes in determining
presence/absence, abundance and composition of populations?
8
138. What are the relationships between the quality and quantity of plant resource
investment toward their different tissues?
139. In long lived species (e.g. turtles) that produce many offspring in a given year
across multiple years, is the offspring contribution to the adult population regular
across years or are there always bumper “year classes”
140. How does the 'personality' of individual animals affect the performance (e.g.
reproduction, dispersal) of the populations to which they belong?
141. Given the unmanageable multitude of hypotheses about population declines (and of
combinations thereof), when a population starts to decline, how can we organize
research effort in a way that can isolate the cause(s) and possible mitigation
mechanisms?
142. Is genetic variation sufficient for populations to adapt to environmental stressors?
143. What determines the lower threshold of population abundance?
144. Can several reciprocal feedback processes simultaneously shape the dynamics of
interacting populations?
145. What are the population dynamic consequences of delayed life-history effects in
space and time?
146. What causes massive variability in recruitment?
147. What are the magnitudes of direct and indirect selection on reproductive strategies
in the wild?
148. How does environmental stochasticity shape functional traits of species?
149. Does global change disrupt aboveground-belowground interactions due to
differences in the spatial and temporal scales of processes above- and belowground?
150. What affects the predictability of population size?
151. What is the relationship of species traits to their ecological behaviour? This is again
meant in very wide sense – can the physiological properties of a species determine
its habitat preferences? But also, how much can the species’ “soft traits”, i.e. easily
measurable (say morphological) properties, predict physiological behaviour, and, in
consequence, its habitat preferences.
152. Why do some non-native species require disturbance events to colonise whereas
others do not?
153. To what extent are the effects of abiotic conditions on individual fitness direct
versus indirect (e.g., by changing ecological interactions)?
9
154. What explains the persistence of small populations over long time periods? Are they
just the lucky ones, have they evolved adaptations to being small, or do they simply
live in a very predictable environment?
155. Why do only some trees lose their leaves in winter?
156. To what extent do population processes reflect the effects of stochasticity?
157. Should most ecological models be age-structured? and if so how? It is clear that
many marine organisms have huge variation in size between larvae and adult; in
addition for most complex organisms survival, reproduction and predation are all
linked to age. Should we be using coupled PDEs (Partial Differential Equations)
that can capture age-structure in all of our models?
158. To what extent does adaptation drive ecological dynamics at different scales?
159. How does environmental stochasticity interact with the intrinsic dynamics of
population systems, and how will changes in environmental signals filter through to
affect dynamics?
160. How should we model ecological systems in order to minimise forecasting error?
161. How does density-dependence function in non-equilibrium systems?
162. Is hysteresis ecologically relevant, or is it only Scheffer pestering us with cusps?
163. Should we discard deterministic models, and switch to stochastic ones?
164. Should we discard frequentist statistical methods and go Bayesian?
165. Should we move from hypothesis testing to a more systems based analytical
approach?
166. What alternatives to long-term time-series are there for detecting change in natural
environments and linking this to specific drivers?
167. How important are transgenerational effects to population dynamics?
168. How important are plastic responses to population dynamics?
169. Does diet choice, habitat choice or mate choice govern lifetime reproductive success
(or Ro; or population growth in general)
170. How can behaviour of individuals shape population behaviour in response to
disturbance?
171. What determines population numbers in a given environment?
172. What proportion of species are helpfully viewed as metapopulations?
173. What are the causes of under crowding?
174. What are the levels that under crowding occurs?
175. What determine under crowding?
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176. How does the ecology of a species change through time?
177. Can remote sensing and DNA barcoding be combined to allow real time population
and community monitoring on multiple scales?
178. Can the shape of a functional response be predicted? Can you use species traits and
system characteristics to predict the form of a functional response?
179. How important are animal population dynamics to plant population dynamics in
different biomes?
180. How important are individual differences in determining population dynamics?
181. How much are typical population sizes determined by extreme events?
182. To what extent does food-meditated spring body condition determine subsequent
breeding success?
183. What is the long-term implication of nutrient removal from rural landscapes and
concentration in urban centres?
184. Is P limitation a factor that will be of overwhelming importance in the long run also
in temperate forests?
185. Is competition for light inherently more asymmetric than for nutrients?
186. Which nutrient(s) control productivity of terrestrial biomes, from the poles to the
tropics?
187. Among plants, are the best competitors those that are least sensitive to a shortage of
limiting resources?
188. Does seasonality (the alternation of periods with different resource abundance and
renewal regimes) contribute to instability of trophic interactions?
189. What role do endosymbionts play in regulating the dietary range of insects?
190. What is the relative importance of biotic versus abiotic feedbacks between the plant
and soil environment?
191. What is the relative importance of biotic interactions (e.g. predation, competition)
versus abiotic interactions (e.g. fire, weather) in structuring animal and plant
communities in arid environments?
192. Are communities structured more by biotic interactions between species, or abiotic
interactions between each species individually and the environment?
193. Why would nutrient resorption (THE major source of resource conservation) be
decoupled with the plant economics spectrum (that is, other “conservative” traits)?
194. What is the most important carbon source for below-ground animals and fungi:
roots or litter?
11
195. How do aboveground-belowground interactions determine why species are and the
assemblage of ecological communities?
196. How important is allelopathy in natural plant communities?
197. What excludes fast-growing plants from infertile soils?
198. How do organisms void elemental excesses when dealing with non-ideal quantities
and qualities of resources?
199. How do resource pulses in arid environments affect resource use and interactions
between organisms?
200. Which ecological processes are similar between micro- and macroorganisms?
201. How does ecological disturbance govern C, N and P dynamics and capital in
terrestrial ecosystems?
202. What is the role of species interactions in driving ecosystem processes, including
fluxes in the ecosystem of C, N and P?
203. In highly nutrient limited ecosystems, such as arctic tundra, what will be the key
limiting factors for those plants that will dominate as a result of a future climate?
204. What factors modify the reciprocal flow of nutrients between aquatic and terrestrial
systems and what are the ecological consequences of such modifications?
205. How do major macronutrient cycles (N, P) interact to modify carbon stocks and
flows?
206. What will be the overall magnitude of the biogeophysical (e.g., albedo) and
biogeochemical (e.g., cycles of C and H2O) feedback from the global forest to the
atmosphere under a changing climate?
207. How will greenhouse gas emissions from soils vary as peat lands dry out and tundra
warms?
208. How can we measure plant biomass without killing them?
209. How does the summation/ integration of individual plant and plant unit allow
responses to local environmental conditions?
210. How do plants adapt to changes in CO2?
211. C4/C3 photosynthesis – are the C4 ones getting more common in nature?
212. What determines the strength of trophic interactions?
213. Do trophic interactions just reflect metabolism?
214. How do species traits influence the strength of trophic interactions?
215. Do interaction strengths determine food web structure?
12
216. What are the interelationships between body mass, abundance and food web
structure?
217. How does spatial scale affect the structure of food webs?
218. How does warming affect the strength of trophic interactions?
219. Are alpine plants pollen limited?
220. What is the relative importance of direct (consumption, competition) vs indirect
(induced behavioural change) in determining the effect of one species on others?
221. How do the allometric scalings of attack rates and handling times differ among
biomes, and between the land and ocean?
222. What controls relative strength of competitive vs facultative interactions?
223. What limits size of top predators?
224. How affect interspecific interactions (e.g. trophic) distributions of interacting
species at different spatial scales?
225. Is competition between plants more intense under productive or unproductive
conditions?
226. How important are ecological processes (i.e. competition/predation/mutualisms) in
explaining the diversification of life?
227. Phylogenetic community structure (PCS): How do mutualisms/predation contribute
to PCS? We have not yet looked at interactions other than competition for driving
PCS, despite the fact that we know mutualism/predation are important in general.
228. How important is intra-guild predation in structuring communities?
229. How is vulnerability to predation affected by rarity?
230. Is competition between plants predictably replaced by facilitation in harsh
environments?
231. Is there a competition-colonisation trade-off in plants?
232. What is the relative incidence of competition vs. facilitation in plant communities?
233. What are the effects, and the relative contribution of competition and facilitation to
determine local and regional patterns of plant diversity?
234. Are bipartite mutualistic networks really just driven by competition within each
partite (e.g., plants in a plant-pollinator network) for access to partners within the
other partite (e.g., pollinators within the same plant-pollinator network).
235. How is the process of competition, the actual fight for resources between two
neighbouring individuals, regulated (by time, by external environmental drivers)
13
and how does it then translate into the final well-known measures of plant success,
e.g. biomass, seed production?
236. How widespread and important are enemy-mediated indirect interactions (apparent
competition, apparent mutualism) in ecological communities?
237. Does the balance among species interactions (such as competition and facilitation)
shift in a predictive way along environmental gradients? (this is basically the stressgradient hypothesis which is still unresolved)
238. How does the relationship between ecological processes such as competition or
facilitation and spatial patterns change across scales
239. Do prey-predator size ratios drive dynamics, or does selective extinction drive
observed size ratios?
240. What processes or factors lead to the persistence of mutualisms?
241. What is the relative importance of trophic and non-trophic interactions? (How does
trophic connectance compare with non-trophic connectance, and what determines
variation in this balance?)
242. How opportunistic are ecological interactions i.e. do mutualisms etc arise rapidly or
do they require long periods of time to evolve?
243. Are phylogenies a good surrogate for the differences in ecological role among
species?
244. How might temporal- or condition-dependent assimilation efficiency affect our
understanding of food webs?
245. How do pervasive structural features of interaction webs (e.g., nestedness)
originate?
246. Under what ecological conditions do the benefits of cooperating with other species
outweigh the costs of doing so? (this is the most basic question one can ask about
facilitation and mutualism, and one for which we still don't have a clear answer.)
247. What aspects of ecological networks affect their stability?
248. How do food webs respond to temperature change and variation?
249. What is the ecological role of physical processes (internal waves, atmospheric
turbulence) in shaping trophic interactions from micro to macro spatial scales?
250. What are the impacts of introduced species on native food webs?
251. How does the composition of a parasite/commensal/symbiotic community impact
on host fitness?
252. To what extent do plant mediate interactions between herbivores and microbes?
14
253. Does artificial plant breeding disrupt co-evolved plant-insect interactions and plant
defence mechanisms?
254. How important are symbiotic/commensal microorganisms for host evolution?
255. Are there really ubiquitous (or close to it) distributions of micro-organisms that
contrast clearly with limited distributions of macro-organisms. If so, where is the
discontinuity and why?
256. How important is consideration of coinfection in understanding disease dynamics?
257. How does ecology influence the emergence and dynamics of disease?
258. How will climate change affect disease emergence and dynamics?
259. What is the importance of plasmids in bacteria/symbionts in insects/other laterally
transferred parts of genome in altering ecological/evolutionary dynamics?
260. Can ecological understanding help in the management and treatment of infection in
individuals?
261. What part is played by parasites and disease in food webs?
262. How can we understand (and predict) the evolution of diseases? Why are diseases
virulent when this causes morbidity or mortality in the host and therefore reduces
the chances of transmission? Why are some infections short-lived while others are
persistent? What key features do we need to understand these different adaptations
to the pathogen life cycle. Do we need a full understanding of the pathogen's
genetics or can we safely assume that disease characteristics evolve in a continuum?
263. Is the mode of transmission of pathogens a good predictor of disease dynamics?
264. How are directly transmitted parasites maintained in fragmented host populations?
265. What effect does host dispersal ability have on the spatial spread of parasites with
different life history strategies?
266. What is the role of population structure in the transmission of infection? Clearly
human (and animal) populations are segregated at a variety of scales: households,
social groups, work-places, communities, nations etc etc -- how much of this
structure is needed and can any of it be approximated?
267. To what extent do plant-associated microbes such as plant pathogens and foliar
endophytes drive patterns of insect herbivory?
268. How do plant-mediated interactions between beneficial microbes and insects affect
plant fitness and productivity?
269. How do plant-associated microbes affect plant-induced defenses against insect
herbivores?
15
270. How do belowground symbioses between plants and microorganisms contribute to
the ecology and evolution of aboveground plant-herbivore interactions?
271. To what extent is plant community composition and diversity determined by
interactions with above-ground (e.g. insects) and below-ground (e.g. soil pathogens)
natural enemies?
272. Does ecological theory developed for plants and vertebrates apply equally to
microorganisms?
273. Is the resource allocation model that underpins most ecological thinking correct?
Are animals really limited by food/energy supply that they must allocate between
alternative functions, or do other physiological constraints act first?
274. Does microbial diversity directly reflect stability and productivity in the soil
environment?
275. What is the extent of microbial diversity and what is its relationship to functional
diversity?
276. Can the well established body size abundance/diversity relationships be extended to
microbial organisms?
277. Do macro-ecological theories such as the island biogeography theory apply to
microbial ecosystems?
278. Does microorganism diversity (functional type, species, genotype) matter for
ecosystem processes?
279. Is successful forest restoration on a workable timescale dependent on mycorrhizal
inoculation?
280. How do we measure wildlife disease intensity?
281. How much detail of the parasite community is needed in order to predict the impact
of disease on host populations?
282. What is the role of diseases imported with invasive organisms?
283. What are the effects of heterogeneity in host-parasite infectivity to the epidemiology
of the disease?
284. Would thinking of the immune system as an ecosystem (sequentially assembled to a
given level of diversity in the first years of life) designed to cope with “invasive”
infections help in better design of vaccines?
285. When can heterogeneity in host response to parasites be safely ignored?
286. How do microparasites influence communities and food web theory?
287. What is the role of parasites in maintaining host species diversity?
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288. Can we understand the ecology of microbial communities inside other organisms
(e.g. in the gut)?
289. When does one or a few infectious organisms drive host-parasite population
dynamics and when does the community matter?
290. What are the role of diseases in shaping the community?
291. Are there endemic, endangered or even extinct microbes?
292. How different would communities be if there were no diseases?
293. What is the level of functional redundancy in prokaryotic communities in terrestrial
and aquatic environments? (ie does prokaryotic diversity matter?)
294. How are parasite communities assembled?
295. How important are parasites from an ecological perspective? [are parasites or
predators the dominant factor controlling population sizes?]
296. To what extent are community dynamics pre-determined by macroevolutionary
patterns?
297. Is functional redundancy common? Can we remove species without ill effects on the
others?
298. Which community properties, if any, make some ecosystems more resilient than
others to environmental change?
299. What (if any) kind of relationship is there between genetic diversity, functional
diversity, and functional redundancy?
300. How important are functionally redundant species for the resistance of biodiversity
to disturbances?
301. Do disturbances impact different trophic levels equally?
302. How do behavioural interactions scale across food webs?
303. Are aquatic communities really more size structured than terrestrial ones?
304. Is the stability of ecological communities predictable?
305. With which traits can we predict the functioning of extinct communities?
306. Will coral reef communities be able to adapt or 'migrate' in response to ocean
change (temperature/depth/pH etc.)
307. Are diverse communities more robust to disturbance than depauperate ones?
308. Are diverse communities more robust to environmental change than depauperate
ones?
309. To what extent are communities discrete entities that can be studied in isolation?
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310. Given the global declines of pollinators, what levels of resilience can we expect in
insect and plant communities to continue effective propagation of species namely
crops and foods?
311. What determines the resilience of communities under environmental change?
312. In which types of natural communities do equilibrial co-existence models apply and
in which are conditions sufficiently non-equilibrial that equilibiral co-existence
models do not apply?
313. Improved understanding of which fundamental ecological issues by a broad crosssection of society would significantly improve the conservation status of biological
species and communities?
314. Which is the role of plant-emitted volatile organic compounds in the structure and
function of insect communities?
315. What role does the "community context" have for constraining or facilitating the
responses of individual species to environmental change?
316. How do different plant community types respond to changes in the same
environmental factors (i.e. temperature, precipitation, nutrient availability)?
317. How precise and accurate must model structure and parameter estimates be, in order
to predict community responses to environmental change with adequate precision
and accuracy?
318. What determines the predictability of species extinctions and community collapse?
319. What is the importance of intraspecific variability for community stability?
320. Do marine invasives perform additional functional roles to those existing in the
native community subject to invasion?
321. How well can community stability and function be predicted from body size
distributions, and how effectively could size-structure serve as a measure of
community “health”?
322. Which structural properties of interaction webs actually increase community
stability and biodiversity maintenance?
323. How do predator functional responses change with community dynamics?
324. Which rules of population biology might be easily generalized to community
ecology, e.g. density-yield relationships, diversity "strategies" (and whether they
exist and can evolve within clones, populations or even communities), self-thinning
and allometric relationships, "community genetics and evolution", resource vs.
pathogen vs. mutualist niches structuring communities?
18
325. Do observed changes in kelp forest composition affect associated biodiversity?
326. Do webs of biotic interactions “collapse”, and if so what variables can predict this?
327. Under what circumstances are different types of disturbance interchangeable (with
respect to consequences for species composition, diversity, etc.)?
328. Are some species functionally redundant, even in the context of stochastic and
deterministic environmental changes?
329. To what extent are the processes underlying increased functioning also the
processes that give coexistence?
330. How much of response to changing environments will be intraspecific and how
much interspecific turnover?
331. What is the relative importance of phenotypic plasticity, genotypic variation, or
inter-specific variation in determining how communities respond to environmental
change, and how do this vary across different trophic levels or across different
ecosystem types?
332. Which mechanisms allow the long-term coexistence of grasses and woody plants
over such a wide range of systems? (This is basically the “savanna question”)
333. How does random arrival of species control the succession of ecological systems
after disturbances?
334. Are there fundamental mechanistic differences between aquatic and terrestrial
systems?
335. How do long-term structure of networks change with global warming? There are a
lot of studies now describing structure of ecological networks, but we don't know
what will, or is expected to, happen with increasing warming of our earth.
336. What are the consequences of specifying models and theory in terms of size,
biomass or numbers in population and community ecology?
337. When is it appropriate to replace species identity with size in population and
community ecology?
338. Are the trade-offs and traits that structure terrestrial communities the same as those
that structure aquatic communities?
339. At what level, and to what extent are recognised ecosystems structured on dominant
keystone species?
340. Why does community composition change in space - is it more than the sum of the
parts?
341. Are redundancy and resilience linked at the community level?
19
342. Do community traits confer the ability to predict responses?
343. What are the relative roles of factors affecting species composition at fine sptial and
temporal scales (namely, chance events, dispersal limitations, environmental factors
and biological interactions) -- and how all this varies between biomes and eons?
344. How does flexibility of traits affect species coexistence?
345. Can you predict the consequences of species extinctions?
346. Do all species interact? Do all species interact even if weakly? If some interactions
are so weak do we simply not observe them?
347. How can we integrate multispecies dynamics across spatial scales? How do we
scale up from small to large processes?
348. How do weak interactions affect multiple forms of stability?
349. Climate dependence in which aspects of demography and / or species interactions,
explain species-climate correlations?
350. How saturated or close to equilibrium are communities?
351. What factors govern the composition of ecological communities?
352. Are local communities only legacy, i.e. is there no convergence of community
structure for sites which start with different species sets? (In other words: Will the
founder-effect dominate communities for ever?)
353. Can we predict the performance of species in new environments/communities based
on species’ traits or trait combinations?
354. What role does facilitation play in the development and structure of communities?
355. How does community composition and structure arise from small-scale competitive
interactions?
356. To what extent do local competitive interactions scale-up to produce a decisive
influence on community level patterns and processes?
357. How connected are communities?
358. The role of taxonomy in ecosystem niche overlap / stability. Is a speciose area A
more stable than area B if in B the species aren’t closely related?
359. How are ecosystems altered through the simultaneous gain of species (through
invasion) and loss of species (through extinction)?
360. Does the number of species have any effect on the properties of natural ecosystems,
beyond those predictable from traits of individual species?
361. Are there any practically usable proxys for measuring the 'health' of an ecosystem?
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362. How do structural features of ecological communities relate to the dynamics of
those communities, e.g., their stability to outside perturbation, and how do both
relate to ecosystem services provided?
363. What practical methods can we use to tell when an ecosystem is near a “tipping
point,” after which dramatic and difficult-to-reverse changes will occur?
364. What confers robustness to outside perturbations on an ecosystem, and how is this
robustness affected by climate change and other human impacts?
365. Can we predict the future state of ecological systems? At what resolution of
measurement, and level of ecological organization and for what system types is this
possible?
366. What are the ecosystem impacts of worldwide predator declines?
367. Desert ecology: how do punctual and intense climatic events (droughts, rains) affect
the ecology of populations and communities on the long-run? how will changes in
community structure in deserts affect other ecosystems?
368. Whether and to what extent species extinction affects ecosystem properties. Does it
matter to the ecosystem to lose one or a few species, or can we loose easily half of
the species without the ecosystem being affected?
369. What is the importance of functional-group diversity to sustain ecosystem
productivity across biomes?
370. What is the contribution of biodiversity to sustain long-term productivity in manmade ecosystem?
371. How resilient are species interactions within variable environments? To conserve
interactions among species within such variable environments - interactions that
may be essential for healthy ecosystem functioning - do we need new concepts,
approaches and theories; or alternatively, is a side effect of conserving enough
species that we'll end up preserving critical interactions as well?
372. What are the ecological impacts of the radioactive materials released from the
Fukushima nuclear power plant? It is obvious that materials with ‘strong’ radiation
have substantial effects on an ecosystem but we still do not know what effects
materials with ‘weak’ radiation have.
373. How predictable are the impacts of climate/global change on ecosystems and their
functioning in terms of transient dynamics, interspecific interactions types, initial
conditions, time horizon and phenotypic plasticity?
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374. Are humans part of ecosystems and if so, what is their ecological role? Are they an
integrated part of it?
375. Does the complexity of ecosystem processes increases or decreases across
ecological and spatial scales, and is the complexity of predicting them increase
alongside?
376. What are the effects of overpopulation, degradation of global ecosystems towards
speciation processes and species’ adaptive responses?
377. How can we model feedbacks and interactions between abiotic and biotic
ecosystem/landscape components (under non-stationary conditions)?
378. Which factors and mechanisms determine the resilience of ecosystems/landscapes?
And how can we better manage them in order to reliably provide
ecosystem/landscape services?
379. How do tightly-linked coevolving organisms (mutualisms, pathogens) shape
communities and ecosystem processes?
380. How deterministic are ecosystem dynamics?
381. What are the relative importances of abiotic stochastic factors versus deterministic
ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem dynamics?
382. How do we consider spatial relationships in ecosystems?
383. How can ecosystem functions be maintained as communities change due to altered
abiotic conditions and biotic interactions?
384. How much the enhancenment of connectivity between habitat areas can compensate
for habitat loss over different spatial and temporal scales and for different types of
ecological processes and ecosystem services?
385. How important are the dynamics of individual traits and life histories in
understanding population and ecosystem change in the wild?
386. How can we predict the ecological / ecosystem effect of eliminating a species?
387. What role does biodiversity play in ecosystem resilience?
388. How vulnerable/stable are ecosystems in the face of environmental change? Can
tipping points be identified in ecosystems before they are passed?
389. Are ecosystems subject to real “tipping points” the exception or the rule? How real
is irreversibility in ecosystem change? Under what circumstances does it occur?
390. Are more or less ‘natural’ ecosystems more resilient to change?
391. Will the complexity of interactions that occur in ecosystems always prevent us from
making predictions that are reliable beyond the short term?
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392. What role do transients play in the dynamics of ecological systems?
393. Ecologists focus on differences between systems, and how those processes change
over time. What kind of processes are consistent within a particular habitat across
different datasets (e.g. a woodland), and yet do not exist in other systems (e.g. a
grassland).
394. To which extent might tipping points in the earth system be influenced by terrestrial
vegetation?
395. What are the key biosphere-atmosphere interactions that affect climate and air
quality at multiple spatial scales?
396. How dependent on hydrological regimes is the ecology of seasonal wetlands
(especially poorly known are dune wetlands & mountain flushes) and what are the
implications of climate change?
397. At what scale does geology replace ecology in explanations of biodiversity and
ecosystem function?
398. How much do you need to know to predict how ecosystems function across spatiotemporal scales?
399. Are ecosystems significantly impacted by increasing environmental variability?
400. How can interactions besides feeding and pollination be included in ecological
networks, e.g. transmission, dispersal, immunity?
401. Are there common themes in resilience?
402. What is a resilient ecosystem?
403. What are good metrics for resilience?
404. What is the relation between the structure of interconnections and the way they
behave – within an environment?
405. Are there general patterns in ecosystem perturbations?
406. Can we acurately describe an ecosystem? Empirical description at all spatial and
temporal scales.
407. Are there real differences between biomes? Are there regularities in ecological
systems between marine, freshwater and terrestrial systems.
408. How do you measure the complexity of an ecosystem?
409. How will ecosystem services be affected by global environmental change?
410. How is ecosystem function altered when biodiversity is lost through realistic
extinction scenarios?
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411. Will ecosystems that have lost species or those with a high proportion of introduced
species respond differently (from those that haven't) to environmental change?
412. How does biodiversity affect the functioning and stability of natural ecosystems
413. How does spatial scale affect the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem
processes?
414. How much diversity is enough? How much diversity is needed at landscape scales
to maintain ecosystem processes at local scales.
415. What is the relative contribution of biodiversity (species richness, species identity,
functional identity, functional diversity) to ecosystem functioning, relative to that of
conditions (climatic or microclimatic) and resources (nutrients, light)? How do
these different contributions operate?
416. How does the form of the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship change in
different contexts (e.g. environmental change scenarios)?
417. What is the effect of species richness and diversity on ecosystem functioning?
418. Question of importance of diversity for functioning (and stability) – again, can be
considered at various temporal and spatial scales. Should include genetic diversity
of a population, but also (species, phylogenetic, functional) diversity of a
community.
419. What is the shape of relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning?
420. How does the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function vary with
different functions?
421. What measures of biodiversity best characterise relationships to ecosystem
function?
422. Have we focused research too much at the species level? Does it matter how many
species there are for ecosystem function?
423. How substitutable are species (in terms of ecosystem function/services/cascades)
and can we predict this in advance (i.e. can we predict which ones we can afford to
lose/can we predict the effects of losing particular species)?
424. What is the differential sensitivity of different ecosystem functions to the loss of
different taxa or different functional groups for different types of ecosystems? What
mechanims explain such differences (or similarities)?
425. What are the effects of biodiversity change (species loss, change in species
taxonomic or functional composition) on ecosystem functioning and the ability to
deliver ecosystem services at different spatial scales (ranging from laboratory
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experiments to plots, landscapes, municipalities, states or countries)? What key
processes operate at these different spatial scales in relation to such effects?
426. How does the structure of ecological networks affect ecosystem functioning?
427. What ecosystem services are provided by poorly known ecosystems? (E.g. deep
oceans, groundwater)
428. How much does genetic variability contribute to ecosystem functioning? In what
ways does this variability play a role in what we perceive as “ecology”
429. What is the relationship between genetic diversity and ecosystem functioning?
430. What is the role of biodiversity in determining the resilience of ecosystem function
in rapidly changing environments?
431. How reliable are financial valuations of ecosystem processes and ecosystems?
432. How importance(t) is species rarity for ecosystem functioning?
433. In ecosystems that are effectively novel, due to recent anthropogenic extinctions of
some species and/or invasions of others, what are the essential functional units of
the food web that have to be filled (with exotic species if necessary) to restore
ecosystem services?
434. What is the best way to assist migration of species to maintain ecosystem function?
435. Is tree species identity important regarding the provision of a wide array of
ecosystem services from forests (e.g., C storage, timber production, biodiversity for
biota other than trees, protection from avalanches and rockfall, etc.)?
436. How much does biodiversity contribute to ecosystem services?
437. How much does an individual species or species group contribute to ecosystem
function?
438. What are the critical levels of ecosystem stocks necessary to maintain ecosystem
services?
439. What is the relative importance of top down versus bottom up processes in
regulating ecosystem function?
440. Do rare species matter to ecosystem functioning?
441. To what extent are rare species important in ecosystems?
442. Do species matter (more than any other component of biodiversity) for ecosystem
functioning?
443. Can technology replace most (or all) ecosystem services?
444. When is biodiversity unimportant and what are the minimum levels we can tolerate
with reasonable function maintained?
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445. How do we integrate between spatial scales and understand how spatial structure
influences ecosystem function?
446. What do we need to measure to know what the function of a component organism of
an ecosystem does?
447. To what degree is it possible to describe ecosystem functions (in space or time)
from partial knowledge?
448. Are the relationships between ecosystem functions the same in different
environments?
449. What are important ecosystem functions in coastal systems?
450. How do we identify the thresholds limits in number of species, number of particular
functions?
451. How can human knowledge obtained from domesticating natural ecosystems, and
managing ecosystems, best be used to improve ecological theory?
452. How important are rare species in the structure and functioning of ecological
communities?
453. How can we predict the response of complex systems to perturbations when we
have incomplete knowledge?
454. Are productivity and network complexity related?
455. Can we predict or understand when do tipping points exist? Or: Can tipping points
be predicted and if so how?
456. Is it important that models of complex ecosystem can be stable? What are the
relationships among the many existing mechanisms (phenomena) that can stabilise
complex ecosystems? What is the relationships between complexity and stability?
457. Can we predict the responses of ecosystems to land use change based on the traits of
species?
458. How does biodiversity influence ecosystem stability?
459. What are the effects on ecosystem function of large-scale extinctions?
460. How can we reliably predict critical thresholds/tipping points in ecosystems? (e.g.
with respect to the effect of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning)
461. When does if matter about the individual species for ecosystem function? NB taxa
vs. function?
462. How can ecological complexities, such as the resilience of natural capital stocks, be
incorporated into the evaluation of natural capital and ecosystem services?
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463. Does the phenomenon of critical slowing down as an indicator of the proximity of
tipping points translate from microcosm studies to field ecosystems?
464. How does soil biota modify the physical environment, and so impact the flow of
matter and energy and the delivery of ecosystem goods and services?
465. If a priority is given to restoring rivers to reference conditions as defined under the
Water Framework Directive, what would be the trade-offs involved between
different ecosystem services
466. How do the stressors of flow alteration, nutrients, sediments and channel
morphology combine and interact to define the conditions for aquatic and wetland
species?
467. When is the identification of cryptic species crucial for our understanding of the
functioning of ecosystems?
468. What are the implications of climate change induced reductions in mean fish size
for their roles in lake ecosystems?
469. How do we measure ecosystem services and their link to ecosystem structure and
function?
470. What are the specific components of ecosystem resilience under greatest threat from
agriculture and what are the consequences of loosing this resilience in terms of
ecosystem services? [Bruce Howard]
471. Is there anything inherently different about the biogeochemical cycles of the
northern and southern hemispheres?
472. Do ecosystem functions evolve through time?
473. Does ecosystem disassembly follow the same rules as assembly?
474. What traits of organisms, are important in determining different ecosystem
properties?
475. What are the relationships between multiple measures of stability?
476. What makes a species important? Can you predict the importance of species for
stability or functioning of ecosystems based on its traits? E.g. position in a food
web, phylogeny, body size?
477. Can we predict ecosystem dynamics? Can we model the dynamics of real
ecosystems with all their component parts?
478. Acidification vs warmer temperatures in coral and in primary producers in general:
which one is the worse problem, and do they interact?
27
479. How important is adaptation by natural selection in mediating species responses to
climate change?
480. How will whole ecological communities respond to climate warming and other
aspects of global change? Can information about species responses be scaled up to
understand whole-community responses?
481. How do we develop a robust mechanistic understanding of empirical links between
climate change and long term changes in species distribution and abundance ?
482. Will species with TSD go extinct in the face of projected climate warming ?
483. Will climate change cause mass extinction?
484. Will climate change uncouple trophic links due to phenological change?
485. What impact is climate change/ocean acidification having on benthic primary
production?
486. How are responses of primary consumers to climate change/ocean acidification
altered/mediated by changes in composition/biomass of primary productivity?
487. What potential maladaptation issues can arise from climate change adaptation
measures (e.g. artificial coastal defences)?
488. Is attribution necessary in climate change impacts science?
489. How can we link local responses of individuals, populations and species to global
climate change?
490. Given current and imminent climate change and our ongoing history of intervention,
management, translocation and introduction of non-native species and genotypes,
how necessary is it to ensure the conservation of observed patterns of genetic
variation?
491. How does the role of plant-plant (or other biotic interactions) change in relation to
prevailing environmental conditions such as climate? Is this predictable?
492. How do natural communities cope with or even adapt to increased frequencies of
extreme weather events predicted under global climate change?
493. What is more important for biodiversity loss: land use or climate change?
494. How will changes in climate affect primary productivity dynamics around the
globe? (bearing in mind that climate change is linked to changes in averages,
seasonal patterns and occurrence/severity of extreme climatic events; and that
changes in primary productivity dynamics could involve changes in average
biomass production, changes in seasonal patterns in primary productivity and/or
changes in level of inter-annual variability in primary production).
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495. How will the interactions between land cover modifications, climate change and
socioeconomic transformations drive the patterns of occurrence and intensity of
wildfires and their ecological impacts in the future?
496. The premise that climate change will uniformly affect species distributions is known
to be false because of the apparent unpredictability of climate-mediated changes to
species interactions in food webs - so , how can applied ecologists predict how
climate change will affect species interactions in food web dynamics?
497. How & how fast will species distributions change with climate change?
498. How does climate change shift species' distributions?
499. Can we predict future distribution patterns based on climate change projections?
500. Which aspects of climate change are likely to lead to widespread tree mortality, and
what are the underlying mechanisms?
501. How will climate change influence primary production (the underpinning of all
ecology)?
502. How will change in land-cover feedback on the climate (e.g. through combined
effects of changes in carbon sequestered and changes in albedo)?
503. With reference to climate change is the term “adaptation” a source of serious and
even dangerous misunderstanding?
504. What is the role of interspecific interactions in buffering species responses to global
change?
505. Comparison of recent global changes to those during the last glacial period. I am
not sure how to formulate this as a question that would not sound too trivial.
Nevertheless, I believe that we can get a perspective for what is going on from the
changes that happened from the last glacial maximum (or perhaps, from the whole
quarternary).
506. How sensitive are organisms to changes in ocean pH/ocean chemistry?
507. Do soil microorganisms represent a significant sink for atmospheric CO2?
508. How much biodiversity are we loosing and how much will we lose (assuming rate
of loss will slow as vulnerable species/habitats are converted)?
509. How many species do we really have, considering those that were already lost and
those that might already start evolving (as a dynamic process)? How many species
did we loose?
510. At what rate are we discovering new species compared to the number of species
under threat/or near extinction and how has this changed over the past decade?
29
511. In the face of rapid environmental change, what determines whether species adapt,
shift their ranges and/or go extinct?
512. What are the long-term impacts of invasive species worldwide?
513. The modern world presents animals with challenges such as windows, light
pollution, cars ... we often study adaptation to pollution etc., but do things ever
adapt to these urban sources of trouble?
514. What are the ecosystem level effects of ocean acidification?
515. How successful are protected areas when surrounded by human settlement?
516. How can the impacts of human activities be separated from environmental impacts
for commercial species?
517. Given current/projected per capita rates of consumption, at what critical regional or
global human biomass do efforts in conservation become no longer viable?
518. Is human population optimally distributed?
519. Does the well being of a nation increase or decrease the probability of humanwildlife conflicts?
520. Which silvicultural treatments and other management practices in human-made or
seminatural forests (and other woodland habitats) can promote the adaptation of
plant and animal communities to changing environmental conditions and increasing
societal pressures?
521. How does biodiversity change impact on human health and well-being?
522. How much biodiversity would be left in a world where the whole human population
were adequately fed?
523. Does harvesting result in human-induced evolution of harvested species?
524. How do the destruction and fragmentation of habitat affect biodiversity?
525. Is “fishing down the food chain” fact or fiction ?
526. What is the level of bycatch in fishing gear for endangered marine animals and how
can it be mitigated ?
527. What effect will loss of land races of agricultural crops have long term?
528. Can we restore biodiversity? (non-existing species cannot be brought back)
529. How do genetically modified organisms affect biodiversity?
530. Which of genetic, life history or food web constraints are more relevant to
predicting and detecting responses to environmental change?
531. How do we understand ecosystems of which humans are a part?
532. Does ecology exist in urban environments?
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533. Does ecology only exist in pristine areas?
534. What is the effect of history on current and future biodiversity trends?
535. What caused the discontinuation of lemming cycles in northern Europe?
536. How do we frame ecological conservation objectives for fragile ecosystems, such as
the arctic, which are under stress from development and climate change pressures?
537. Will high atmospheric CO2 lead to a surge in ecosystem productivity and/or a
reduction in water stress in natural and disturbed ecosystems?
538. How will ecological communities respond to high atmospheric CO2?
539. How will tropical forests respond to warmer temperatures? What is the thermal
niche of tropical forests?
540. Will climate change ultimately reduce or increase species richness?
541. How does warming alter the structure and stability of communities?
542. How will warming affect species loss?
543. How will species demographic rates be affected by global warming? Warm versus
cold blooded species.
544. How influential will the genome, epigenome and second genome (i.e.
symbiogenome) be in controlling local adaptation to climate change?
545. What will be the magnitude of the terrestrial carbon sink in 50 and 100 years time?
546. What is the legacy of human disturbance on the structure and composition of
tropical ecosystems?
547. How will climate change alter disturbance regimes?
548. What geographic and biodiversity gaps remain in the global terrestrial protected
area system?
549. Can we find a way to support long-term ecological research (individual-based field
studies) in the tropics, given the high levels of tropical diversity and
disproportionate threats. Funding should be allocated outside of the typical 3-5 year
grant schemes, allowing consistent data collation.
550. Do non-agricultural and semi-natural habitats and communities contain a genetic
capital that could be used for crop/ livestock improvement?
551. What is the most important social change within the ecological community to affect
positive decisions in society?
552. Can we pretend that human activity is just like that of any other member of an
ecosystem and analyse "us" in the same way as other keystone species?
553. Why is ecology (and ecosystems) confusing to law makers?
31
554. Is the change from a legal to an economic epistemology likely to reduce extinction
rates? (or) Is ecosystem services thinking dangerous?
555. What can we learn from experimental systems? Do we need the ecological
equivalent of the geneticists C.Elegans? Should we be striving for a single simple
system against which we can test our ideas and understanding?
556. What is the most appropriate baseline for determining future change in status of
marine systems (for policy directives such as the MSFD Good Environmental
Status, MPA assessments etc.)?
557. What are the key species required to maintain human persistence?
558. How can be used sound and well-tested ecological theory to decrease poverty and
improve human welfare?
559. Overpopulation has disrupted ecological stability, short-term and long-term negative
impacts (will) affect humans, thus the costs of loosing biodiversity are high? So,
what are the ultimate sustainable strategies to shift to a stable culture for humans
and the biosphere…??
560. When is it appropriate for human interactions with ecological systems to be
integrated into ecological models rather than treated as an external driver?
561. Which ecological theories or generalisations have actually proved useful when
applied to human management of the environment?
562. Should we draw limits to the scope of the discipline of ecology and if so where (e.g.
with respect to the totality of ways in which human beings interact with their
environment, or with respect to physiological and other processes occurring within
organisms, geochemical cycles in atmosphere, earth and ocean, hydrology etc.)?
563. To what degree should methods drive progress in ecology?
564. To what degree is progress in ecology constrained by the focus on experimental
approaches?
565. What more can ecology learn from economics?
566. Is it time for the peer-review model of science and academia in general to evolve
and possible increase transparency particularly to the public?
567. What ecological concepts and terms have proved most useful in knowledge
exchange with people who have not had a formal education in ecology?
568. How important is it for ecological research to seek to bust commonly held “myths”
about ecology?
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569. Which ecological myths should we try hardest to remove from formal educational
curricula?
570. What kind of ecology do we want?
571. Is there such a thing as pure ecology?
572. Can we afford to keep biodiversity?
573. What forms of response do species take to drivers of change?
574. Do ecologists need to be natural historians?
575. Does ecology matter to conservation when the problem is human behaviour?
576. How is our understanding of ecology influenced by publication bias?
577. Are there landscapes/communities/taxonomic groups that we have not focused on?
578. Are there theories/concepts in ecology that we should abandon?
579. Do we have the tools and education programme to train the current and next
generation of ecologists in quantitative (maths and statistics) methods that can
answer major questions?
580. Would improved ecological education of the population improve environmental
decision making by our leaders?
581. Is taxonomic bias (everyone loves big mammals) useful or dangerous to engaging
the public in ecological issues?
582. How can ecologists get long term funding for long term projects?
583. Under what conditions is ecology a predictive science?
584. Are there generalisations (general laws) in ecology?
585. Can simple models really be informative for specific ecological problems?
586. What advances can ecology make by harnessing the power of modern technology
(sensing, informatics, computing)?
587. Is the generalised shape of stressor-response relationships appropriate to all
situations?
588. Can the distribution and flow of information help integrate ecology with biology
and physics?
589. Why is it that so many people (including “ecologists”) cannot discriminate between
ecology as a science and simple surveying / counting?
590. Plant ecology still largely lacks any significant predictive powers. I think this is true
at a range of scales from the individual to, populations to communities. The subject
is still largely descriptive, all be it in a much more quantitative way than 30 years
ago. You could argue, as Grime C-R-S does, that his concept of plant strategies/
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functional types was capable of providing an element of predictability, but I don’t
believe this approach has been successful.
591. What laboratory systems can be developed and usefully canonized as broadly useful
model systems for population and community ecology, in the same way drosophila,
e. coli, and yeast, for instance, have been canonized as broadly useful systems in
other fields of biology?
592. How do we begin to model the complexity of the natural world? What types of
model / interactions should be assumed? Is a reductionist approach where we only
consider 1,2 or 3 interacting species ever going to be successful?
593. Are ecologists’ efforts to construct a pseudo-physical unified theory productive – or
are they bound to fail since biological systems are too complex to be reduced to a
handful of physical laws?
594. Is there a unifying theory of ecology?
595. Body size of an organism is strongly correlated to many physiological and
ecological properties, and can be used to help understand population-, community-,
ecosystem-, and global-scale phenomena. What additional organism traits must be
incorporated into models to more fully understand phenomena at higher levels of
organization?
596. Are there universal ecological models, or does each ecosystem and species require
its own formulation? Are there basic well-formed building blocks that will allow us
to create functioning models.
597. Can we afford to degrade biodiversity further?
598. Can we replace palm oils?
599. Is our system of democracy capable of delivering good environmental outcomes?
600. Can we identify commonalities of where predictive ecological models have
worked?
601. Comparative demography: is there a population economics spectrum (very much
along the ways of the leaf economic spectrum idea)?
602. Considering population ecology relates to species across social and catchment
boundaries, why do we continue to have many scientists working on the same or
similar topics in departmental silos across states and countries?
603. How can the proportion of students studying ecological disciplines at university be
increased?
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604. How can market funds be channeled into on-the-ground protected area monitoring
and protection?
605. What political, economic and social instruments are required to curtail the illegal
wildlife trade?
606. What is the effect of changing food availability for consumers and how can we
make quantitative predictions of this?
607. What is the most effective way of combining observations and experiments in
improving ecological knowledge?
608. Can ecology be a truly predictive science? (i.e. useful ability to generalise from
feasible study effort to novel situations)
609. How effective has improved knowledge of ecological mechanisms been in our
capacity to predict future change?
610. How reliable or accurate have past ecological predictions been and on what basis
have these predictions proven true (i.e. from lab or field experiments, modelling,
theory or collective research)?
611. How can the culture of ecology as an academic discipline be modified to make
progress more rapid and to increase the usefulness of ecology for society?
612. How can the review process be modified to increase the quality and usefulness of
outputs?
613. What is the error rate of published ecological literature, what is the nature of
published errors, and how do errors affect academic understanding and policy?
614. What can policy ever learn from realistic ecological models, since they do not
contain the "unknown unknowns"?
615. How can we measure the ‘importance’ of an ecological process?
616. Is an environmental Kuznet’s curve at the global scale possible?
617. How does biodiversity contribute to human mental health and well-being?
618. In view of frequent gaps between optimization models and experimental data,
should we re-think the concept of optimization, currently presumed an axiom in
behavioural ecology?
619. Do ecological laws apply to other domains (banking, internet, memes, exobiology)?
620. Are undergraduate ecology curricula appropriate?
621. Which ecological generalities apply to humans?
622. How important is improved ecological understanding of the natural mechanisms
enabling species co-existence to improvement of our conservation of biodiversity?
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623. Ectotherms appear generally to be getting smaller as a consequence of climate
change in aquatic systems. What are the causes of this, how universal is it, and what
are the consequences for biodiversity, community structure and ecosystem function.
624. Can we understand the ecology of organisms on other planets etc.?
625. What are the statistical consequences of model misspecification, and how do they
affect ecological theory and understanding, predictions about the future states of
ecosystems, and policy development?
626. Are mixed effects models the panacea people think they are for ecology.
627. How can we best produce predictive models that encapsulate different aspects of
ecological understanding, so that they can be rapidly combined into accessible tools
for exploring multifaceted scenarios?
628. Does modelling the observation process inherent to any ecological investigation
improve our ability to infer population processes?
629. Can ecological models ever be truly predictive? Consider the SORTIE model of
Pacala and co-workers, or the Florida panther model developed by Gross and
colleagues; even these highly sophisticated models fail to capture the full dynamics
and are far from being predictive. This obviously links to questions on how
ecological modelling can be used in practical situations.
630. How do we begin to parameterise ecological models? This is made much more
complex by the number of interacting species, the range of different model choices
and the fact that we generally only observe populations close to equilibrium (such
that non-linear effects are difficult to measure).
631. Can we develop a robust, scale-explicit and non-ambiguous measure for comparing
species diversity between locations and systems – in order to replace the scalesensitive, ambiguous and misleading β-diversity?
632. Can we employ technology to count species and individuals.
633. What are the relative prospects of success of stochastic versus mechanistic
predictive ecological models?
634. What are the roles of sampling methods in understanding ecology?
635. Is hysteresis the exception or the norm in ecological systems?
636. What do species do? My reasoning is that for most species, irrespective of how
common they are, we simply don't know. And when we do, its for one or two
processes only. Knowing, I would argue, is fundamental to everything else.
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637. Some fish stocks are now bouncing back after overexploitation. Are the prospects of
this happening impacted by evolution?
638. Evolutionary theory predicts that conspecifics often benefit, evolutionarily
speaking, by developing traits that do not benefit the group (Rankin et al. 2007). But
does this really show: How often does intraspecific conflict have a significant
impact on population growth?
639. Does microevolution play an important role for the success of a species on an
ecological time scale?
640. How, and at which spatial and temporal scales, do we integrate the ecology of
species interactions with the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution?
641. How do we best include rapid contemporary/ongoing evolution and coevolution in
ecological studies?
642. How do evolutionary and ecological dynamics interact?
643. To what extent can we ignore evolution in addressing a specific ecological
question?
644. Does evolution/coevolution increase (or reduce) the complementarity and
productivity of communities?
645. What are the relative potentials of plasticity and evolution to enable life history
adaptation, and how do those vary among traits and species?
646. Does ecological and evolutionary change always occur simultaneously?
647. How important is short-term evolutionary change in determining the response of
ecosystems to environmental change?
648. Will evolutionary rescue play an important role in natural populations?
649. Do extinction times have an activation energy?
650. What features of animals allow them to deal with warmer temperatures?
651. Is it true that negative environmental impacts on bigger species (those of larger
body size) are, all else equal, more damaging due to life history traits that associate
with large bodies — except maybe in fish??
652. How do fecundity, body size and generation time relate across taxa?
653. What is the relative contribution of different levels of selection (individual, kin,
group, lineage, etc) to life-history evolution and the resulting population dynamics?
654. What drives mate choice, and how can this impact on conservation?
655. How significant is the fact that early life conditions influence adult phenotype? Do
epigenetic effects play any role at the ecological level?
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656. Does genetic variation within a species matter to ecologists?
657. Demo-genetics: are assumptions currently being made on population models
regarding the contribution of "mothers" at time t to "babies" at t+1 correct from a
genetic standpoint?
658. How does epigenetic variation impact a population's resistance to disturbance and
environmental change?
659. What are the magnitudes and durations of cross-season carry-over effects on lifehistories?
660. What are the intrinsic covariances/trade-offs among major life-history traits (agespecific reproduction and survival) and to what degree do they constrain elasticities,
sensitivities and population growth rate?
661. How do operational sex ratios compare to offspring sex ratios in species with
temperature dependent sex determination ?
662. Are behavioural syndromes important?
663. How can we measure fitness in fungi?
664. Is there an integrative long-term measure of fitness? Would one make sense in the
context of temporally varying selective environments?
665. How accurate are estimates of baseline population (i.e. pre-exploitation) levels?
666. How does genotypic variation determine ecological performance?
667. What are the limits of phenotypic plasticity for adaptation to environmental change
(common gardern experiments, transplant experiments)?
668. Should we worry about the consequences of conservation actions that mix different
(locally adapted) gene pools of a single species? Do these management options
represent best practice in conservation?
669. Will species specialize, adapt and evolve to urban environments? If so how and
when?
670. Is adaptation to urban environments an evolutionary process? Are abundance &
body size relationships constraining that: large-bodied individuals have small
population?
671. Is there a selective pressure to be cute, given how much conservation relies on the
values people hold?
672. Are co-evolutionary processes important for population responses to environmental
perturbation?
38
673. When is trait variation more important than rapid evolution in response to
environmental change?
674. What are the traits of migrant insects vs. residents and birds?
675. What ecological questions are best suited to molecular data?
676. What molecular methods are best suited to ecological questions?
677. Do subpopulations within meta-populations share adaptive variation evenly, or do
they represent adaptive mosaics?
678. What is more important, climate or ecology? When climate drives recruitment, can
processes such as predation or competition overwhelm the climate signature.
679. What explains life history differences in autotrophs globally?
680. How do evolutionary changes affect structure of density-dependence?
681. What are the magnitudes and mechanisms of sex-specific genetic variation in
fitness?
682. What is the genetic basis of variation in fitness?
683. How important is individual variation for the outcome of ecological interactions?
684. How do species traits and the environment contribute to determine ecological
network structure?
685. Why so many species? (Or, why not more species?)
686. Why THIS level of species richness at a given site?
687. Is there a way to predict, from first principles, how many species can coexist in a
given area?
688. Why are there so many species?
689. To what extent does competition influence species distributions? Do assembly rules
exist?
690. How relevant are assembly rules in a world of biological invasion?
691. Are there community assembly rules?
692. What is / is there a saturation level for the number of species within trophic levels?
693. What is the amount of vacant ecological niche space?
694. Why are there so many vacant niches?
695. Does niche partitioning exist and if so does it contribute to species coexistence?
696. Are most plant communities unsaturated with species?
697. Does coexistence of species in plant communities depend on forces (niche
partitioning, limiting similarity or complementarity) that prevent coexisting species
from being too similar? If so, what are the key traits?
39
698. The humped-back model of herbaceous plant diversity (a unimodal relationship
between annual production (standing biomass and litter) and maximum species
richness) is the most frequent relationship in natural plant communities. Are there
particular circumstances under which such a relationship is not found?
699. Why do abundance distributions in natural communities conform so closely to the
predictions of neutral theory when so often a clear competitive “winner” emerges
when species encounter each other in pair-wise fashion?
700. What are the relative contributions of stochasticity, species interactions and
environment in governing the composition and dynamics of plant communities and
how does this depend on species richness?
701. Which mechanisms stabilize species rich communities?
702. To which extent is species composition (and in consequence also the diversity)
controlled by available species pool (or dispersal limitation), and to which extend by
interaction within community. It is clear that the answer will depend on spatial
scales of comparison (i.e. on the grain, i.e. size of community, and on the extent, i.e.
size of area within which we compare individual “communities”. There is a similar
question (because the species pool is to a large extent determined by historical
phenomena, to which extent are recent communities shaped by recent ecological
interactions, and to which extent by historical phenomena (which can include both,
the long-term evolutionary history, but also the postglacial migration).
703. Can trait-based approaches help us to predict shifts in community structure
(composition, abundance) following environmental change?
704. What allows species to co-exist, and a secondary but related question, are their
emergent functional properties that occur when certain collections of species coexist? I think this remains largely un-resolved.
705. To what extent do stochasticity and environmental noise break deterministic plant
interactions, and how does this depend on species richness? (If the biotic
neighbourhoods and environmental conditions experienced by individuals are is
highly variable species may converge on similar generalist life history strategies).
706. Does stochastic niche theory explain biodiversity patterns better than niche or
neutral theory of biodiversity?
707. Are simple tradeoffs the answer to multispecies coexistence? Are more complex
tradeoffs required?
40
708. Can we determine the biodiversity properties (e.g. species-area relationship) of a
large area from spatially structured “point” surveys?
709. What is the best way to configure a given amount of total habitat if we are to
maximise the number of habitat-dependent species that we can conserve – both in
the short term and in the long run?
710. Under what circumstances (and at what scales) do temporal and spatial
environmental heterogeneity most increase (or decrease) diversity?
711. Why is there usually a positive correlation between range and local abundance in
plants?
712. Does coexistence require space? How much does space heterogeneity affect
coexistence, and how does this vary across spatial scales?
713. How do species coexist?
714. What is the relative importance of stochastic versus deterministic processes in
controlling diversity and composition of communities, and how does this vary
across ecosystem types or across trophic levels?
715. Does an ecosystem have any ‘vacant’ niches? If it has, how many and why does it
have them?
716. How do we explain species co-existence across scales? (current theories, including
niche and neutral theory, clearly do not provide the answer)
717. Why do some cities maintain so much more life than other cities?
718. How many undescribed species are there out there?
719. Are species numbers increasing or decreasing?
720. How does soil biodiversity influence plant diversity?
721. How far does counting species take us?
722. How do the relative importance of niche and neutral processes varies among
communities?
723. At what stage(s) in forest succession does the species density peak for arthropods,
nematodes, fungi and microbes?
724. What traits govern coexistence?
725. Are the traits that govern coexistence in soil, plants and animals similar?
726. How do major life history trade-offs, common to most organisms result in such
immense diversity?
727. Does diet choice, habitat choice or mate choice govern the structure of ecological
communities?
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728. What aspects of community composition are predictable in space and time?
729. What stabilises consumer resources antagonistic interactions?
730. How can many species evolve and coexist in an seemingly unstructured (marine)
environment?
731. What is the role of community traits in shaping the environment?
732. How many species does it take to form a community?
733. How do ecological networks arise and how do we best describe them?
734. Why is species diversity often apparently higher than niche diversity and why are
hyper-diverse regions often phylogenetically overdispersed?
735. How can earth observation and field monitoring data be used to monitor
biodiversity at multiple geographical scales?
736. The CBD 2010 targets were for reductions in the rate of biodiversity loss, a good
ecological indicator yet we could not measure this with any confidence. Can we
develop more consistent sampling of global biodiversity and derive more precise
and measurable targets that could facilitate delivery of ecological aims?
737. Why are the tropics so diverse?
738. Which theory best explains the latitudinal gradient? If more than one theory is
plausible – can we assign weights to the role of each explanation?
739. Is ecological diversity a self sustaining phenomena?
740. Are southern temperate forests more species rich than northern temperate forests?
741. What happens to a species' niche once the species goes extinct?
742. How many species could the world theoretically support? I.e., how saturated is the
world?
743. Is plant diversity the main driver of wider community diversity in tropical forests?
744. What are the ecological mechanisms contributing to high biodiversity in the tropics?
745. Do latitudinal diversity gradients result primarily from local-scale ecological
processes (e.g., strength of density-dependent competition or predation) or largerscale evolutionary / biogeographic processes (e.g., differential rates of speciation,
colonization or extinction)?
746. How can so many species co-exist? This seems to be an eternal, but still not fully
solved question. I expect that the effect of pathogens (and, albeit to a lesser extend
also predators s.l.) will be found as most important, but there will be undoubtedly
other mechanisms of “increase when rare”. I believe that we need some progress in
ecological theory here, but mainly, the mechanisms suggested by the theory should
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be demonstrated experimentally. The question might be formulated also as “What
are the mechanisms maintaining the species diversity?” Part of the question can also
be the differentiation of traits, on consequently, the relationship between the species
diversity, functional diversity, and phylogenetic diversity.
747. How do we explain latitudinal gradients in species richness?
748. Why are there more species in the tropics than in temperate climes?
749. Do latitudinal diversity gradients result primarily from local-scale ecological
processes (e.g., strength of density-dependent competition or predation) or largerscale evolutionary / biogeographic processes (e.g., differential rates of speciation,
colonization or extinction)?
750. What are the mechanisms behind the latitudinal gradient in biodiversity?
751. To what extent phylogenetic diversity does reflect functional-group diversity?
752. What proportion of biodiversity is deterministic versus based on random processes?
753. To what extent are communities a function of the external environment (abiotic
/biotic environment)
754. At what scale does ecology become too specific to predict regional and global
patterns of diversity?
43