Priorities for ecological synthesis research to address pressing global issues

Accelerating environmental challenges requires a strategic vision for synthesis in ecology and environmental science

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We are staring down the barrel of increasingly consequential impacts on the Planet from multiple global change drivers, particularly climate change and biodiversity loss.

It's important we strive to understand these impacts on socio-ecological systems, both in terms of what has already played out and what may play out in the future. Doing so will enable society to mitigate, adapt or transform.

But this requires research that spans disciplines, that spans scales from local to global, and that integrates different knowledge and value systems.

Moreover, as technology continues to develop, we are increasingly inundated with huge datasets, but also a huge body of literature from the rise in productivity of individual researchers and teams.

So this leaves us with lot of potential data, information, and ideas sitting out there in a disorganised and disconnected way.

This is where synthesis comes in. Synthesis in ecology and environmental science helps us to achieve these goals of condensing this huge body of information and transforming it into something useful. It helps us understand complexity across scales, find generalities across piecemeal studies, bring messy and patchy datasets together, and ultimately inform policy.

But what is synthesis exactly?

In ecology, synthesis brings data, research, and theories together in a variety of ways, including meta-analysis (statistical analysis of the results of many different studies to get a more reliable answer than any one of them), systematic reviews (a structured review of existing studies on a single topic – may or may not include a meta-analysis), or the compilation and reanalysis of a large body of datasets combined from previous studies, among other techniques. By combining lots of data, these studies tend to be of a larger scale, both spatially or through time, than individual researcher-driven studies.

These synthesis projects are often performed in synthesis centres, places that are specifically set up to run working groups that synthesise science. The number of these has grown rapidly over the past 20 years¹ due to the increasing amount of data available to synthesise and the benefit such projects have demonstrated.

Synthesis centres have proven to be critical for the advancement of ecology and environmental science. These places help to accelerate the transformation of piecemeal information into useful, actionable information to address complex challenges, as well as simply helping to more rapidly advance our understanding of how the world works. And there's no doubt, as the world continues to change and the challenges we face evolve, their importance will continue to rise.

Indeed, one of the most cited papers in our field resulted from a synthesis working group. This paper from Costanza et al. (1997), which outlined the 17 'services' that ecosystems provide, and quantified the economic value of these, really had a major impact on the field for the decades that followed, including to help establish the discipline of ecological economics.

So, ecological synthesis is a critical tool in our arsenal to understand, predict and address the consequences of global change. But there are things that need to be addressed to improve the practice as a whole, bringing together the different disciplines within ecology and environmental science to address challenges associated with the rapid and complex shifts in our environment.

That's why, back in 2021, Ben Halpern, the Director of the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) organised a workshop on Future of Synthesis in Ecology and Environmental Science. I happened to be part of that workshop along with more than 100 others.

“We brought together a diverse community of ecologists and environmental scientists — about 120 people — to share ideas and key questions and help boil all that down into a set of priorities to guide the research community in the coming decade. We hope that people can use this work to support their efforts to pursue pressing research needs.” Ben said.

The end result was seven research priorities and two issues for the general practice of synthesis moving forward. We published these results² a couple of years ago in the journal Ecosphere. The paper is open access and digestible, so do check it out if you feel inclined, but I'll provide a very short summary of the main priority areas below.

Priority topics

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice

Disadvantaged populations can be disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation. Incorporating diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) into ecological research helps tackle these unequal impacts. Increasing the diversity of workshop participants can generate more impactful and relevant research and policy for a broader community. We need to lower the barrier to entry.

Coupled human–natural systems

Synthesis has helped to uncover the causes and consequences of environmental change. But it won't properly understand how human values, decisions and governance structures drive outcomes without addressing the complexities of coupled human-natural systems. Integrating diverse disciplines, knowledge, and data is challenging due to differences in the spatial and temporal scales at which socioeconomic factors and those of natural systems act. Synthesis science can help bridge these gaps and improve understanding of coupled human–natural systems, but this requires additional time and effort to be allocated to projects.

Actionable and use-inspired science

Through rigorous meta-analysis, systematic review, and predictive models, ecological synthesis is well placed to inform decision makers. The cross-system insight can be powerful for informing global to local action. However, synthesis science has not often engaged practitioners adequately to co-develop questions, methods and appropriate data use. Authentic relationships and partnerships among science, policy, and practice are required. Improved communication, coproduction, transparency, and data reuse, coupled with the co-development of relevant research questions, and embracing diverse knowledge systems, is important for supporting evidence-based decisions and improved effectiveness of synthesis.

Scale

Everything in ecology is scale-dependent. I've touched on the importance of cross-scale diversity in ecology in a previous post. Synthesis science must incorporate data and approaches across spatial and temporal scales to examine how insights transfer between scales and translate these into policy and decision-making from local to global scales. This is hampered by limited long-term data and barriers to integrating diverse knowledge systems. Continued prioritisation on the collection of long-term ecological data remains a high priority for the entire field of ecology.

Generality

We all want to find general principles in our work that explain the patterns we see in nature. But these are extremely difficult to find in individual investigator-led research due to local contingencies. Synthesis science is one of the primary means of finding generality or the reasons for lack of it by addressing questions across a wide range of conditions. Lack of replication of studies hampers this, as does a primary focus on novel findings. Incentivising open science, standardised reporting, and addressing biases in funding and publication are all areas that will help to overcome these barriers.

Complexity and resilience

Ecosystems are complex by their very nature, particularly when you consider their coupled social, cultural, economic, and political setting. I've discussed before the role that this complexity can have in creating resilience. But it also complicates synthesis because it is context dependent, interdisciplinary, and requires varied data that is not often available. The interdisciplinary nature of this research requires interdisciplinary researchers, which are rare. We need to help build a bigger pool of such researchers, and push for synthesis to be a more interdisciplinary science to accelerate progress. This aligns with my thinking: tackling grand societal challenges requires wide-ranging, creative, and big-picture thinking.

Predictability

Finally, as I've discussed before, we need to scale up our efforts to predict what the future will look like. Given we live in a world with constantly changing conditions, these predictions should be iteratively tested and updated with continuous feedback. We shouldn’t be seeking “perfect” forecasts. Poor forecasts are fine so long as the uncertainties are explicitly recognised.

Caption copied from the paper: "Our approach to engaging participants and all perspectives in developing, honing, and presenting the set of questions and ideas that form the basis for our recommended priorities. DEIJ is diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice."

Conclusion

We are facing major consequences of accelerating global change. This requires more concerted efforts to make sense of the sheer volume of data we are faced with to provide actionable solutions in a rapidly changing world. The seven priority areas will become more significant as more and more data continue to arrive, providing increasing opportunities for synthesis.

As part of the paper, we also recognised two common threads for the process and practice of synthesis science that need addressing: expanding participation and expanding the data and knowledge foundation. We must expand our efforts to include diverse participants and worldviews, and to engage with marginalised communities. We also must continue to focus on integrating and standardising data collection efforts to improve our ability to synthesise the wealth of data we continue to generate.

This was a fun paper to be a part of. It was a truly immense effort from Ben and the organising team to wrangle so many people and co-authors in a way that resulted in something meaningful.

Is this topic interesting to you? Would you prefer more insight into the process of research in ecology in future posts? I'd happily provide some more posts of this nature, including more on ecological synthesis and its benefits. Leave me some questions below if you have any particular areas you'd like me to expand on. I'm pretty sure I didn't do as good a job as I could have this time in removing jargon.

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1. There are a wide range of biodiversity/ecological synthesis centres out there now. A list of them can be found here: https://synthesis-consortium.org. The most well known are probably NCEAS, sDiv, CESAB and SESYNC.

2. The paper:
Halpern, B. S., C. Boettiger, M. C. Dietze, J. A. Gephart, P. Gonzalez, N. B. Grimm, P. M. Groffman, J. Gurevitch, S. E. Hobbie, K. J. Komatsu, K. J. Kroeker, H. J. Lahr, D. M. Lodge, C. J. Lortie, J. S. S. Lowndes, F. Micheli, H. P. Possingham, M. H. Ruckelshaus, C. Scarborough, C. L. Wood, G. C. Wu, L. Aoyama, E. E. Arroyo, C. A. Bahlai, E. E. Beller, R. E. Blake, K. S. Bork, T. A. Branch, N. E. M. Brown, J. Brun, E. M. Bruna, L. B. Buckley, J. L. Burnett, M. C. N. Castorani, S. H. Cheng, S. C. Cohen, J. L. Couture, L. B. Crowder, L. E. Dee, A. S. Dias, I. J. Diaz-Maroto, M. R. Downs, J. C. Dudney, E. C. Ellis, K. A. Emery, J. G. Eurich, B. E. Ferriss, A. Fredston, H. Furukawa, S. A. Gagné, S. R. Garlick, C. J. Garroway, K. M. Gaynor, A. L. González, E. M. Grames, T. Guy-Haim, E. Hackett, L. M. Hallett, T. K. Harms, D. E. Haulsee, K. J. Haynes, E. L. Hazen, R. M. Jarvis, K. Jones, G. S. Kandlikar, D. W. Kincaid, M. L. Knope, A. Koirala, J. Kolasa, J. S. Kominoski, J. Koricheva, L. T. Lancaster, J. A. Lawlor, H. E. Lowman, F. E. Muller-Karger, K. E. A. Norman, N. Nourn, C. C. O’Hara, S. X. Ou, J. L. Padilla-Gamino, P. Pappalardo, R. A. Peek, D. Pelletier, S. Plont, L. C. Ponisio, C. Portales-Reyes, D. B. Provete, E. J. Raes, C. Ramirez-Reyes, I. Ramos, S. Record, A. J. Richardson, R. Salguero-Gómez, E. V. Satterthwaite, C. Schmidt, A. J. Schwartz, C. R. See, B. D. Shea, R. S. Smith, E. R. Sokol, C. T. Solomon, T. Spanbauer, P. V. Stefanoudis, B. W. Sterner, V. Sudbrack, J. D. Tonkin, A. R. Townes, M. Valle, J. A. Walter, K. I. Wheeler, W. R. Wieder, D. R. Williams, M. Winter, B. Winterova, L. C. Woodall, A. S. Wymore, and C. Youngflesh. 2023. Priorities for synthesis research in ecology and environmental science. Ecosphere 14:e4342. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4342