Producing environmental knowledge: Ecology, research priorities, and policy

There is no one correct set of research questions that ecologists should pursue to most effectively explore the world. This dissertation investigates how ecologists and users of ecological knowledge evaluate the merits of potential research priorities. Written as four separate but closely linked articles to be submitted to journals for publication, this research uses a mixed-method approach to investigate how the ecology research agenda has changed over time, to understand how ecologists and users of ecological knowledge evaluate the merits of potential research projects, and to explore how ecologists and their work act within broader policy processes. This work provides important insights into the ways in which ecologists contribute to societal understandings of the environment and environmental problems.;Chapter 2 is a bibliometric analysis of the changing subjects and methods of ecology over the period 1970--2005. In addition to undergoing significant growth over that period in terms of the number of articles published annually, ecology has converged around a shared set of subjects and methods. Molecular genetic techniques have become central to the field, as have the topics of climate change and tropical forests.;The remainder of the dissertation seeks to understand the reasons behind the observed changes to the ecology research agenda. Chapters 3 and 4 report on studies that use Q method to better understand how producers and users of ecological knowledge evaluate the merits of potential research questions. Chapter 3 focuses on the producers and users of coral reef-specific knowledge, and Chapter 4 examines ecologists' perceptions of research priorities. The Q method approach, which had not previously been applied to understanding scientific research priorities, demonstrated that there are distinct groups within both the coral reef and ecology communities that share research priorities. These studies report on the ways in which these distinct groups come to understand what constitutes legitimate and interesting research in their respective areas.;These distinct cultures of evaluating research priorities within disciplines and within issue-oriented communities presents challenges to science policy makers who attempt to make science as useful as possible in addressing problems. The existence of these distinct cultures is not recognized in science-policy processes despite the fact that they may have significant influence on research portfolios. Chapter 5 uses the Ways of Knowing theoretical framework to understand how these empirical findings relate to societal conceptions of environmental and other problems.