Data on distribution and abundance: Monitoring for research and management

Abstract

In the first chapter of this book we identified the interdependence of method, data and theory as an important influence on the progress of science. The first several chapters focused mostly on progress in theory, in the areas of integrating spatial and temporal complexity into ecological analysis, the emergence of landscape ecology and its transformation into a multi-scale gradient-based science. These chapters weaved in some discussion about the interrelationships between method and these theoretical approaches. In particular, we discussed how powerful computing, large spatial databases and GIS cross-fertilized ecological theory by enabling new kinds of analyses and new scopes of investigation. However, up to this point we have given relatively little attention to the third leg of this triad, data. This and following chapters focus explicitly on data. The next several chapters discuss the advances in broad-scale data collection and analysis enabled by remote sensing, molecular genomics and satellite GPS telemetry, and how these data have made fundamental contributions to virtually all branches of ecology, especially spatial ecology, landscape ecology, and global scale research.