Ecology must seek universal principles

"principles of Phylogenetics: Ecology

I. Continuous characters – ancestral states Many traits of interest are measured on continuous or metric scales – size and shape, physiological rates, etc. Continuous traits are often useful for species identification and taxonomic descriptions; historically, they were also used in phylogenetic analysis through the use of clustering algorithms that can group taxa based on multivariate phenetic ...

Universal health coverage must include older people

Genetic and metabolic screening of newborns: must health care providers seek explicit parental consent?

Prescriptive and empirical principles of applied ecology

Applied ecology is the science of managing ecosystems for defined outcomes, such as conservation, sustainable harvest, and animal pest and weed control. Robust knowledge in science is often expressed as “principles”. Principles in applied ecology have utility by assisting scientists andmanagers to evaluate currentmanagement and to plan future activities. Principles also have a unifying role by ...

Prediction in ecology: a first-principles framework.

Quantitative predictions are ubiquitous in ecology, yet there is limited discussion on the nature of prediction in this field. Herein I derive a general quantitative framework for analyzing and partitioning the sources of uncertainty that control predictability. The implications of this framework are assessed conceptually and linked to classic questions in ecology, such as the relative importan...