I hope I have understood the last message of Fernando Boero correctly. I.E., those who work on biodiversity per se are not
producing "cutting edge science" that is attractive to the general scientific world, and hence they have to build up their position by added value of societal acceptance etc.
I think it is true, but there are sociological reasons for it. Somebody who is a biodiversity expert usually have spent a lot of time, alone on meticulous studies of his favourite taxon. To built a generally interesting scientific hypothesis or to work out a paradigm in the field of marine biodiversity one need a large scale of comparisons - geographical scale, taxonomical scale etc. This requires mobility, broad international cooperation,
and coordination of research. This is a typical approach of oceanographer, climatologist and landscape ecologist.
Building up the infrastructure and cooperation links (like those developed in BIOMARE) will help us to organise the carefully planned field experiments as Erik described recently.
This will be the most eficient method of upgrading the biodiversity science. |
