A prática científica na ecologia de comunidades: diálogos entre empirismo e teoria na literatura científica

The field of community ecology has been facing difficulties at answering some of the basic questions of this area, as well as to overcome some recurring de- bates on fundamental aspects of its practice. One of the causes that have been sug- gested to explain this limited success are the alleged deficiencies in the construction of ecological knowledge. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, we performed a qualitative analysis of the literature on lizard community ecology, based on a sampling of publi- cations between 1940 and 2002. We evaluated (1) the theoretical development of the field, (2) the use of the available theories and, particularly, the use of the theory of competition by researchers, and (3) the interaction between the theoretical and em- pirical publications. The results suggest that there has been theoretical developments in this field: new hypotheses were proposed and several others were overcome during