Global change: Ecology must evolve by Georgina Mace
Climate change, the threat of pandemics, population growth, food security and the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services demand a new kind of ecology — one that focuses on how whole communities of organisms, at the scale of landscapes or catchments, interact with people and the physical environment.
The advances in ecology in the past century have hugely improved our understanding of species interactions, such as those between hosts and parasites or between predators and prey, as well as population dynamics, food-web dynamics and how organisms adapt to their local environments. Such gains have come mostly from a combination of theory and modelling, and carefully designed long-term laboratory or field experiments in places as diverse as the Serengeti Wildlife Research Centre in Tanzania and the University of Oxford's Wytham Woods site, UK. Indeed, historically, careers in ecology have tended to revolve around the 'ownership' and analysis of a personal study system or a painstakingly curated data set.