Analysis of Basic Ecological Research in the United States, 1966–67

This report is an analysis of the basic ecological research supported by various U.S. agencies for 1966-67. The analyses are based on an examination of approximately 50,000 Notices of Research Projects for the life sciences which were on file with the Science Information Exchange of the Smithsonian Institution in December, 1966. This study was conducted by a subcommittee of a multidisciplinary study group on bioclimatology formed in 1962 by the American Meteorological Society and supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The interdisciplinary study group was charged to evaluate the state of the science of biometeorology today and to make recommendations concerning its future. As the study approached its end, an agreement was reached by members of the study group and the Program Director for Environmental Biology of the National Science Foundation that a survey of environmental biology research in the United States should be undertaken, provided that the Science Information Exchange of the Smithsonian Institution possessed sufficient records to make a valid assessment. The data on which this report is based were withdrawn from the files of the SIE in December, 1966, and are based upon the most recent registration research projects which SIE had at that time. They are the latest data avail able which could be used in a report at this time. For the most part, these projects were active during fiscal 1967, and this summary represents the state of the science as of 1967. One of the most obvious doubts about a report of this type, which purports to be comprehensive, concerns the degree of coverage of the field by the files of the Science Information Exchange. At the time this survey was made, it was the estimate of the Science Information Excha ge that it had registered approximately 95% of federally supported research, including intramural and extramural programs. The registry of projects supported by state and local governments is considerably less. Missing data include research not having specific financial support or that classified in the national interest. The subcommittee working on this project wanted an assessment of basic ecology or environmental biology, exclusive of man-oriented research. This judgment was based on the charge to the committee that it evaluate the state of development of the science, not of the important art of its application. Humanoriented research, including medicine, was judged a special subject and not included. To accomplish the task, a definition of basic research was necessary. The definition used determined a project to be basic if it dealt with the interactions of biological and physical variables with fundamental biological functions or phenomena. All or a major portion of the activities of the project had to be directed toward these kinds of studies for the project to be registered. Some examples of judgments made may be useful here. We included a project on the uptake and disposal of water by plants in an arid climate, but excluded projects on the development of sprinkler irrigation under semiarid conditions. We included a project on the study of the benthic fauna of a reservoir, but excluded a project on the experimental management of warm water reservoirs. We included a study of the relationship of water current temperatures and salinities to the development of striped bass, but eliminated a project entitled "striped bass creel census." The Science Information Exchange stores its information on computer tapes and, in December 1966, had about 50,000 projects in the life sciences. Each project is classified according to a number of categories, e.g., principal investigator, sponsoring agency, subject of the investigation, biological variables and phenomena under investigation, physical or biological variables affecting expression of responses, etc. Information is retrieved by instructing the computer to indicate projects identified with particular category names or "descriptors." Accuracy of retrieval depends on the acuity of delineation used by SIE in storing information and the aptness of descriptors used to query the computer. With the help of SIE staff, the subcommittee devised a concise list of descriptors (biological functions and phenomena on the one hand and physical environmental variables on the other) compatible with the SIE storage categories. This process generated a list of some 13,000 research projects involving organisms and environment, exclusive of manoriented research. Distinction between basic research and applied research and surveys remained to be done. The first effort to separate basic from applied science was made by an examination of the titles of the research projects. A trial run, based on the SIE listing of project titles in the state of Michigan, showed a very close agreement among members of the subcommittee. Eightyeight titles were selected as representing basic research. Since, however, titles are not always accurate indicators of the work done, a second effort was made by examination of the "notices of research project" (NRP) filed with SIE for each project by the investigators or agencies. Three members of the subcommittee made independent evaluations based on these NRP's. The resultant list contained 90 projects, a gain of only two, but there were 34 changes from judgments made by examination of title alone, i.e., changes in which a project originally included was Dr. Schein is a professor in the department of botany and Associate Dean of the College of Science at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa. Dr. Platt is head of the biology department at Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. Dr. Henson is Chief of the Research Branch of the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests, Maple, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Shaw is a professor of agricultural climatology in the department of climatology and meteorology at the Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. Special thanks are due William T. Carlson, Chief, Agricultural and Applied Biological Sciences of the Science Information Exchange, for continued patience and help as the authors struggled to understand the values and pitfalls of computer information retrieval.