This is a guest post by Carsten Dormann. It is his invited keynote lecture at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Gesellschaft für Ökologie in Braunschweig (specifically on 1 Sept 2021 at 8:15). The topic of the conference was “From Science to Policy”, and he deemed it necessary to question whether thus step is not…
A guest post by Carsten F. Dormann. In October 2021, Paul Ehrlich wrote a “Correspondence” in Nature with which I seemed to sympathise to a surprisingly large part. But the last sentence wiped out all agreement, as it revealed a fundamentally different view of the role and “duty” of “scientists”. I wrote this blog at…
A guest post by Carsten Dormann (Uni Freiburg) / @CarstenDormann. Cover picture by Takver via Wikimedia Commons. BioScience has just published the latest installment of “Scientists’ Warnings“. There have been two previous such Warnings, the latest organised by the same authors in 2017. Quite a few scientists have signed this Warning. I chose not to,…
Guest post by Carsten Dormann (Uni Freiburg) / @CarstenDormann The relationship between species richness and ecosystem function is a field of ecology that has always puzzled me. I learned the scientific rope in a department of vegetation ecologists: vegetation was the result of environmental conditions, and indeed a substantial part of their research was to…
This (co-)guest post by Carsten F. Dormann & Florian Hartig summarizes a comprehensive review on model averaging for predictive inference, just published in Ecological Monographs.
A guest post by Carsten F. Dormann Over the last years, I have been using null models more often than I liked. I had to, when there was no other way to figure out if an ecological pattern was unexpected, or trivial. Inspired by some recent (and also some older) posts, I thought I might throw around…
Guest post by Carsten F. Dormann In his book “The Signal and the Noise”, Nate Silvers likened competing scientific hypotheses to betting. If you think that your hypothesis H1 is correct, rather than H2, you should be willing to put money on it, with odds reflecting your belief in H1 vs H2. This post collects…
theoretical ecology 