Abstract
The International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network is currently unmatched by other global networks in its ability to coordinate and collaborate on long-term ecological research and monitoring at a planetary scale. This offers an ideal research, information, and infrastructural platform for the Earth Stewardship initiative. However, to achieve an effective synergy between ILTER and Earth Stewardship it is critical to overcome problematic geographical and conceptual gaps in ILTER Research. To quantify these gaps we produced a new database of scholarly and grey literature generated at long-term ecological or socio-ecological research (LTER) sites worldwide. We assessed: (1) the geographical origin of LTER researchers; (2) the geographical regions where these researchers conduct their studies; (3) which thematic areas are investigated in LTER research, and to what extent do they include concepts associated with Earth Stewardship; (4) in which venues are LTER research outputs published. Regarding the production of knowledge at ILTER, we found a marked Northern Hemispherism: > 90 % of the ILTER publications are generated by researchers from the Northern Hemisphere. Furthermore, 89 % of ILTER publications are generated by researchers associated with LTER networks in the North Temperate region (23° N – 66° N). Regarding conceptual gaps, < 0.5 % of ILTER publications are included in social sciences databases. Noticeably, however, > 99 % of all ILTER publications in the arts and the humanities are generated by researchers working in the South Temperate region (23°N – 66°N), especially Chile. Additionally, in Southern Hemisphere LTER networks research themes associated with Earth Stewardship were the most represented. Our concise analysis aims to call attention to the fact that opportunities exist for greater collaboration and complementarity in research across the ILTER Network. The southern regions can significantly add to the integration of social, ethical, and artistic dimensions to transdisciplinary socio-ecological research at ILTER, providing an intercultural and participatory foundation for Earth Stewardship.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
This dataset should be considered only as an initial attempt to collect a bibliography of ILTER work, and is subject to revisions and omissions as detailed later.
- 2.
Meta-data are searchable data about data. In LTER, a meta-data record about a data set might include time and location of data collection, methods used, species and geographies involved, etc. Many LTER networks (also) publish their data and meta-data in a Global Biodiversity Information Facility repository or other repositories.
- 3.
For example, the title “Geographical and Thematic Analysis of Publications Generated at ILTER Sites” would be processed first into: “geograph*”, “themat*”, “analysi*”, “public*”, “gener*”, “ILTER*”, “site*”, “geograph* themat*”, “analysi* themat*”, “analysi* public*”, “gener*, public*”, “analysi* geograph* themat*”, “analysi* themat* public*”, “analysi* gener* public*”, “gener* ILTER* site*”. Each N-gram was considered to be a plausible concept discussed in the research outputs. Other concepts included “disturb*” (capturing “disturbance”, “disturbed”, etc.), “chang* environment*” (capturing “changing environments”, “environmental change”, etc.), and “chang* impact*” (capturing “impact of change”, “changes impact”, etc.).
- 4.
For example, N-grams including “Antarctic”, “Cascade Mountains”, and “Wisconsin United States” were identified as plausible place-names. These plausible place-names are the basis of further analysis.
- 5.
The lower limit of five is arbitrarily chosen, but reasonable in light of other place-names and kinds of place-names that appear dozens or hundreds of times. Frequent non-place-names included any word that appeared at the beginning of the title, such as “Assessing” and “The”, along with genus names.
- 6.
There is no code for a ‘global’ zone, because among ILTER publications only few papers included research at a global scale.
- 7.
Caution should be exercised in interpreting this ratio because the generation and use of meta-data in the production of research outputs is not well characterized within LTER, and because indexed meta-data may itself refer to other sets of meta-data that have as yet uncharacterized extents.
- 8.
Regarding our methodology it is important to note that the lack of detailed coding of infrequent place-names is not detrimental to the scale of analysis conducted with this method because of its low numbers. In Figs. 13.3 and 13.4, and Table 13.2 each article title may contain more than one place-name, and some place-names may represent more than one geographical location (e.g., the municipality of China in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, the People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of China, etc.). Figure 13.3 counts the number of relationships between research networks (known from their network homes) and the geographic zone investigated (inferred from place-names in article/data titles). Table 13.2 counts the number of times an identifying place-name occurs in each of the zones in articles and data. The number of research outputs/meta-data reported for a zone in Table 13.3 is equal to or lower than the sum of the number of articles/meta-data where that zone is the right side of Fig. 13.3. Table 13.2 counts a small number of research outputs/meta-data not counted in Fig. 13.3, namely those having an uncoded researcher origin Zone due to inadequate meta-data. Finally, it is also important to note that titles of meta-data contained more N-grams about methods and theoretical approaches than did titles of publications.
- 9.
It is important to note that Zone C is not fully represented in the data included in Figs. 13.5 and 13.6 because the data for Mexico LTER are incomplete, and several Asian LTER networks’ databases are still in the early stages of work. Also, not all zones had a network with publications about concepts that were shared by more than seven other networks. (Seven networks as a cutoff is based on the proposition that ILTER Network-wide research should be defined as that which could draw on work from each of the continents. It is also based on the practical consideration that the other 99% of the approximately 10,000 possible concepts not represented here is too vast to code reliably into relevant categories.)
- 10.
It is important to note data quality issues. They included: typos and inconsistent spelling and use of publication names in national- and regional-scale bibliographies, lack of DOIs, and lack of public availability of some documents listed in bibliographies. These issues existed in bibliographies from both small and large networks regardless of geographic location. Furthermore, Asian and non-Latin journal names presented an additional challenge since they are not well represented in the ISI Master Journal List. The impact is clear from the ISI/non-ISI ratios for CERN and Brazil national-scale networks, which both listed many publications in Chinese and Portuguese publication venues, respectively (see Fig. 13.7).
- 11.
It is important to note that there are an unknown number of LTER research outputs that are not listed in bibliographies, and the national and site-level bibliographies themselves are often inconsistent in what they report as publications.
- 12.
For each ISI publication attributed to a zone, the ISI index in which that publication appears is counted. Note that some publications appear in more than one ISI index.
References
Aguirre Sala J (2015) Hermeneutics and field environmental philosophy: integrating ecological sciences and ethics into earth stewardship. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 235–247
Cavnar WB, Trenkle JM (1994) N-gram based text categorization. In: Proceedings of SDAIR-94, 3rd annual symposium on document analysis and information retrieval
Chapin FS III, Pickett STA, Power ME et al (2015) Earth stewardship: an initiative by the ecological society of America to foster engagement to sustain planet earth. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 173–194
Christensen NL, Bartuska AM, Brown JH, Carpenter S et al (1996) The report of the Ecological Society of America committee on the scientific basis for ecosystem management. Ecol Appl 6(3):665–691
Gao S (2015) Aesthetic and moral appreciation of nature in philosophical traditions in China. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 39–48
Huntington HP (2000) Using traditional ecological knowledge in science: methods and applications. Ecol Appl 10(5):1270–1274
ILTER Network (2006) International long-term ecological research network final draft strategic plan. Published by the ILTER Network. http://www.ilternet.edu/about/key-documents/FINAL-DRAFT-STRATEGIC-PLAN-Aug2006.pdf
ILTER Network (n.d.) http://ilternet.edu/
Li B (2013) Searching for theory in metadata. iConference 2013 Proceedings, pp 377–388. doi:10.9776/13216
Li B (2014) Sustainable value and generativity in the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) platform: toward new knowledge and investigations. Proceedings of HICSS 2014
Mamani-Bernabé V (2015) Spirituality and the Pachamama in the Andean Aymara worldview. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 65–76
Maass M, Equihua M (2015) Earth stewardship, socioecosystems, the need for a transdisciplinary approach and the role of the international long term ecological research network (ILTER). In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 217–233
May Jr R (2015) Dorothy stang: monkeys cry and the poor die, earth stewardship as liberation ecology. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 407–418
Porter MF (1980) An algorithm for suffix stripping. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 14(3):130–137
Redman CL, Miller TR (2015) The technosphere and earth stewardship. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 269–279
Rozzi R (2015a) Earth stewardship and the biocultural ethic: Latin American perspectives. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 87–112
Rozzi R (2015b) Implications of the biocultural ethic for Earth Stewardship. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 113–136
Rozzi R, Arango X, Massardo F, Anderson C, Heidinger K, Moses K (2008) Field environmental philosophy and biocultural conservation: the Omora Ethnobotanical Park educational program. Environ Ethics 30(3):325–336 [en español: Filosofía ambiental de campo y conservación biocultural: el programa educativo del Parque Etnobotánico Omora. Environ Ethics 30(S3):5–128]
Rozzi R, Armesto JJ, Gutiérrez JR, Massardo F et al (2012) Integrating ecology and environmental ethics: earth stewardship in the southern end of the Americas. BioScience 62(3):226–236
Sarmiento F (2015) The antlers of a trilemma: rediscovering Andean sacred sites. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 49–64
Shibata H (2015) Biogeochemistry and traditional ecological knowledge and practices in Japan. In: Rozzi R, Chapin FS III, Callicott JB et al (eds) Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 27–38
Singh SJ, Haberl H, Schmid M, Mirtl M, Chertow M (2013) Long term socio-ecological research. Studies in society: nature interactions across spatial and temporal scales. Springer, New York
Turnhout E, Hisschemöller M, Eijsackers H (2007) Ecological indicators: between the two fires of science and policy. Ecol Indic 7(2):215–228
Acknowledgements
This chapter was made possible by a project of the International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) Network, in conjunction with FinLTSER, the THULE Institute, and the Academy of Finland, SYKE – the Finnish Environment Institute, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UK), and the support of the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB-Chile).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Li, B., Parr, T., Rozzi, R. (2015). Geographical and Thematic Distribution of Publications Generated at the International Long-Term Ecological Research Network (ILTER) Sites. In: Rozzi, R., et al. Earth Stewardship. Ecology and Ethics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12133-8_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12133-8_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-12132-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-12133-8
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)