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Harvard Forest Research

Location, location location: how theoretical perspectives, metadata specification and measurment procedures shape long-term distribution databases

Principal Investigator: Ayelet Shavit
Tel Hai Academic College - Israel: Jun 09 2008 - Jun 11 2010:

Abstract:
The objective of this research is to explore whether and how one's concept on ‘location’ shapes one's distribution maps and databases. The method is a comparative historical-conceptual analysis together with participant-observation of biodiversity research in the field. I conduct a qualitative comparison among four case studies of Biodiversity research: Aaron Ellison at Harvard Forest, Craig Mortiz at the MVZ, Berkeley, Barbara Helm at the Max Planck Institute, Germany and a group of primary investigators at MARAG, Israel. I will study the costs and benefits of sharing data across different scientific perspectives of space. Two case studies - at the MVZ, USA and at the Max Planck Institute, Germany - view 'location' as exogenous of the organisms it inhabits; while an alternative is offered by two studies taking place at the Harvard Forest and the MARAG, Israel, representing a location as co-determined by the history of its ‘foundational species’/’Landscape Modulator’. Aaron Ellison at Harvard and a group of Israeli scientists (Gidi Ne'eman, Moshe Shachak, Avi Pervolotsky, Yael Lubin and Ronen Kadmon) at MARAG suggest that a foundational species affects the distribution of most other species in its locality, which in turn affect food chain partitioning and geomorphology of that location. In this context I ask what are, if at all, the impacts of holding similar or different perspectives of space on the interoperability of data collected in these various studies. With the help of an IT expert, I will attempt to retrieve species distribution data relevant to all four databases and compare - within and between exogenous and interactive perspectives of space - the kind and degree of interoperability challenges one must overcome or workaround when using different perspectives of space. :