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An "Editorial"

Free Range Science on the World Wide Web


August 30, 2005
R. F. Mueller


The Virginians for Wilderness' Forests of the Central Appalachians Project has been posted on our web site since 1998. Since then we've received a good number of favorable comments and requests for information from professional ecologists, environmentalists and the general public. We've tried to respond to each one of these contacts if at all possible. Unfortunately the same is not true of a number of professionals who fail to even answer correspondence requesting reprints or other information for our project. And this number includes a very large proportion of the most prominent forest ecologists in the eastern US that have been contacted. I can't accuse these professionals of arrogance or petulance directed at our web site, since there may be mitigating circumstances for even such a large cohort. However, if I were paranoid enough, I might suspect a conspiracy!

Humor aside, it may be that a number, large or otherwise, of professional forest ecologists, who now possess the authority of journal editorships, or who wish to maintain the existing virtual print monopoly of information and idea dissemination, are not quite ready for the Free Range Science now possible on the World Wide Web. I define Free Range Science as a form which operates in the absence of all-powerful editorial and other boards but still adheres to the highest principles of scientific inquiry, and in which anonymous "peer review" is replaced by a far more comprehensive "universal review", anonymous or not, provided by the World Wide Web. While this practice of independence at this stage may not favor career advancement, in a sense it does return scientific communication to its roots. However, republication by some authors of their papers on the Web, while still infrequent, is a positive development.

As part of our project, as an outgrowth from our inventories, I have critiqued several of forest ecology's most revered concepts and found them wanting. The simplest example is the concept of distinguishing climatic, edaphic (soil) and physiographic forest climaxes. Although enshrined in Lucy Braun's brilliant classic Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America, and still widely embraced, this concept defies logic when considered in terms of the universal and inevitably simultaneous influences of climate, substrate and topography, as well as a number of other energetic factors that govern fundamental stability. In sum, there is no a priori reason why any one of these factors should consistently dominate in a given forest type. For example, although the old growth primary Mixed Mesophyte Forest type is conventionally considered to be a climatic climax, it is also edaphic and physiographic, since it is always the result of rich, moist soils and generally occurs on dissected topography. Even within the type, variations such as "acid- mesic" and "calcareous" sub-types reflect the substrate, which is usually directly related to the bedrock.

Another question concerns the validity of using statistical techniques, such as the various forms of ordination and gradient analysis to determine the relationships between forest plant communities. In many of such studies the abundances of individuals of given species enter prominently. However, the writer has attempted to make the argument (stability analysis), by analogy with chemical systems, that the fundamental stability of a species in a community, and hence that of the community itself, is likely to be reflected in the presence or absence of that species rather than in its abundance. Consideration will show that this postulate is borne out in nature, where the abundance of individuals of a given species depends on community history (preceding drought, frost, herbivore activity, etc.) rather than on the relatively simple relations to existing climate, substrate or a restricted number of other environmental factors. Also, the statistical methods cited frequently entail the lumping together of unlike communities formed on widely differing substrates to achieve the simplicity necessary for calculation. In any case, use of average values of critical data is the norm. If stability analysis is correct, microhabitats, in which each species is related to every other member of the community, and individuals are precisely located in relation to substrate, topographic position, etc., form the most significant subjects of investigation. It should also be obvious that this concept lies behind the definition of forest climax as previously discussed. Even on a stand scale these stability relations are readily apparent in many cases. This is shown particularly well in Deciduous Forests Of Eastern North America in which Lucy Braun provides numerous and still unexcelled co-relations between type of bedrock, topographic position and the character of the flora. However, with the present day emphasis on statistical methods of the type previously mentioned, such relationships are largely obscured, except in the most obvious examples. It is necessary to say, however, that the foregoing is not a blanket condemnation of these statistical methods, which may have appropriate and powerful applications other than those discussed above.

Again, it's not possible to say whether the views of the writer regarding much current research played a role in the apparent breakdown in communication cited above, which is however, unprecedented in his more than forty year professional career. But perhaps it merely represents a not entirely unexpected response to the unfamiliar freedom conferred by the World Wide Web- or is simply coincidental?

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