The importance of generating new research questions in ecology
What is the next new sub-field of ecology?
Something that puzzles me: I spend quite a bit of my ‘free’ time trying to think of new research questions to ask, and some of my colleagues do, too. A while ago, when I mentioned to someone that I believe this is an important thing to do, the answer I got was puzzlement. Why? There are so many questions already out there that need answers, why would you come up with new ones. They have a point of course. But is this necessary so different, and does it need to be either/ or? I don’t think so.
There are probably two kinds of new research questions you can ask: new questions within the framework of a broader, existing question, and producing questions that lead to a new field of inquiry. And the transition between the two types of questions is probably blurry and to some extent a matter of interpretation.
Coming up with new questions within the framework of already existing, relatively broad questions.
Coming up with new questions can help address standing questions. Take for example: How does global environmental change affect ecosystems? Clearly quite a broad and important question that needs answers. You can definitely ask new questions in order to provide answers within the framework of this very general question; like how does a new global change factor affect ecosystems; or how does the number of factors affect ecosystems. These are examples of new questions but they also help answer the original, larger question. In a way, asking such questions can help fill in knowledge in novel ways by addressing existing, broader questions.
Generating new questions that start new fields
What I find fascinating: how did fields in ecology like conservation biology, restoration ecology, global change biology come into existence? It must have been through coming up with a rather new type of question to ask that did not directly fit into existing frameworks. I think the beginnings of such new fields are rather diffuse, some people beginning to ask new kinds of questions, with the research theme then slowly starting to taking shape, and very likely they were defined as new fields after the fact, in hindsight.
I think for global change biology, for example, these beginnings are not so clear. At some point someone, or likely several people over time, had to come up with the general topic of global environmental change in the first place. This really opened up a new field of inquiry, a new way to ask questions about our environment and its future as influenced by human activities.
Not all questions are created equal…
One often hears that questions are cheap, what counts is testing them. And of course this is true. But not all questions are created equal. There are clearly different qualities of questions: questions that are generated with an existing framework and that address the next logical step in a certain field are different from questions that break out of an existing framework and open up a new field of inquiry. And these all come in different degrees of novelty.
What is the next sub-field of ecology?
So what could be the next big question to ask in ecology, one that has the potential to create a new sub-field, such as restoration ecology or global change ecology. Or is the field now ‘saturated’ and there is no room for questions at that ‘rank’ any more? Maybe ‘artificial intelligence ecology’, or ‘cyber-ecology’: a subfield of ecology that asks how digital technologies and artificial intelligence affect ecological systems, including human-nature interactions.
What do you think?
Although it may sound cliché, the first "new" field that springs to my mind is mutualistic ecology.
Great post as always. If I could quote Einstein for a moment as he said it better than I ever could: "If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes." Therefore I have to disagree that questions are cheap. In fact in terms of energy and time, they are very expensive. I would agree bad questions are cheap, but great questions are invaluable. I'm concerned that the way we are developing questions is moving away from solving root problems (haha) and moving towards solving the wrong problems. As a more obvious example 'how can we make cars more environmentally friendly?' as opposed to the deeper problem 'how can we prevent the need of cars in the first place?' How can we apply this to ecology to make sure the right questions are answered?