Infusing ecological theory into the design of environmental monitoring

• Peter Kareiva

Abstract
Monitoring has become one of the most widespread activities in ecology. It is used as a safety net to determine whether controversial environmental decisions are working, as a baseline to keep track of our ecosystem's health, and as a source of data for fundamental research. Unfortunately, the data from monitoring programs are terribly under-used -- because the programs are ill-designed, because tools for using the data remain primitive, and simply because of a lack of awareness about the possibilities. In the past, ecologists have tended to view monitoring as dull and without intellectual content. This notion is changing, but not fast enough. I aim to write a book on ecological monitoring that does three things:

1.) improves our "technology" for using monitoring data when testing hypotheses about environmental degradation

2.) suggests how the design of monitoring programs might be improved so that they better serve a hypothesis-testing framework

3.) illustrates how monitoring can be interesting in a basic and applied setting, and catalyzes more work in the area.