Many approaches are being used for research purposes like observational, experimental and modeling. Which approach among all is most effective and why? Especially for research on climate change and ecosystem services etc. Please also explain each approach with its merits and demerits.
Dear Dr. Shedayi, each approach you listed has own field of application, own benefits and limitations.
Observation is good for establishing correlation between climate factors and genetic and physiological characters of plant/animals/microbe populations, species distribution, etc. It needs a long-term study (tens of years) and detailed recording of climatic data and populations diversity. It is rare thing, and such study usually made based on past research of Nationals Parks, Universities, Experimental Stations.
Modeling is based on observation of climate and populations in past and forecast for future based on several mathematical or statistical models. It is good when you can show a quality of your models comparing predicted and actual data during several following years. You can offer unique approach if use new way of data analysis, new sourses of information, new mathematical theories.
Experimental approach is the most expensive but the most reliable. You need to ajust artificially climatic parametes of natural population. I know examples of experiments with increased CO2 concentration, temperature, and moisture content. One of new fields for such experiments is in plant - pathogen/ pest interaction under higher temperature or CO2, which is usually done at greenhouse experiments.
Dear Dr. Shedayi, each approach you listed has own field of application, own benefits and limitations.
Observation is good for establishing correlation between climate factors and genetic and physiological characters of plant/animals/microbe populations, species distribution, etc. It needs a long-term study (tens of years) and detailed recording of climatic data and populations diversity. It is rare thing, and such study usually made based on past research of Nationals Parks, Universities, Experimental Stations.
Modeling is based on observation of climate and populations in past and forecast for future based on several mathematical or statistical models. It is good when you can show a quality of your models comparing predicted and actual data during several following years. You can offer unique approach if use new way of data analysis, new sourses of information, new mathematical theories.
Experimental approach is the most expensive but the most reliable. You need to ajust artificially climatic parametes of natural population. I know examples of experiments with increased CO2 concentration, temperature, and moisture content. One of new fields for such experiments is in plant - pathogen/ pest interaction under higher temperature or CO2, which is usually done at greenhouse experiments.
Since both climate change as well as ecosystem services are generic terms, it is difficult to choose one approach over another. Ideally, data from a cross section of approaches would be co-related, so that a broad understanding of climate change and ecosystem services and their mutual interaction is derived from a synthesis of results obtained by different approaches, whether experimental, observational, modeling or other. Naturally, marine ecosystems vis-s-vis climate change would require a somewhat different set of data from land ecosystems and so on....one could write several books on the topic and still not come to a definite conclusion, I suppose!
Alex and peter thanks for nice explanations.
I would further strengthen the point that no single approach experimental or modeling can be taken as most effective to understand the ecosystem functioning. Every model needs validation and the information will come from experimental and observations. No experiment can run endlessly so models become necessity when we want to look at decadal scenarios. Observations and monitoring are first hand data there are no solutions and if possible they should always be collected.
I think observational and analytical but with:
1)complete data and not censored (for every station and for every year to exist records for every month)
2)uniformly distributed meteorological stations
3)data analysis without predictions
See a sample here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260792027_Extraction_of_the_global_absolute_temperature_for_Northern_hemisphere_from_a_set_of_6190_meteorological_stations?ev=prf_pub
and the supplementary material.
Article Extraction of the global absolute temperature for Northern h...
I am thankful for the valuable ideas and suggestions shared by the experts/scientists and scholars about approaches to conduct research on "Investigation Ecosystem Services in the current climate change scenario" . Thanks allAlex Ignatov, Peter Smetacek, Saif Uddin and Demetris Christopoulos. I would like to further elaborate my point of discussion, for example, if I want to investigate/evaluate/assess ecosystem services of a protected area (National Park or Nature Reserve) under anthropogenic and climate change influence, which specific methods/approaches could be applied. Need further explanation.....
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