Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Publication Date
2022
Journal
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment
Volume
20
Issue
9
First Page
496
Last Page
497
Abstract
Commentary:
Extreme events such as wildfires, hurricanes, and floods have increased in frequency and intensity. It is no longer a question of if, but rather when and where these events will occur (Stott 2016), with adverse impacts on essential ecosystem
services including clean water, harvestable materials, and carbon sequestration. In some cases, extreme events such as wildfires may have positive impacts on populations and ecosystems. Managing these impacts requires understanding how environmental context as well as ecosystem and disturbance characteristics drive system responses (Hogan et al. 2020). However, funding for ecological extreme events research, such as through the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) RAPID program, is typically reactive. Pre-event data, a RAPID prerequisite, are
typically lacking or only sporadically available, and case studies of extreme events often arise from chance disturbances at existing long-term research sites. This reactive stochastic approach has seeded the literature with unplanned case studies describing individual events. While useful for meta-analyses (eg Patrick et al. 2022), such studies provide limited spatiotemporal inference and predictive capacity. Prioritizing the study of extreme events and empirically testing fundamental concepts in disturbance ecology is paramount (Aoki et al. 2022). (...)
DOI
doi:10.1002/fee.2569
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Patrick, Christopher J.; Hensel, Enie; Kominoski, John S.; Stauffer, Beth A.; and McDowell, William H., Extreme event ecology needs proactive funding (2022). Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 20(9), 496-497.
doi:10.1002/fee.2569
