Jyväskylä-based Experimental Ecology as part of international multidisciplinary study of research designs

The Department of Biological and Environmental Science with its comprehensive test design for the national network for monitoring the restoration of peatlands was involved in an international multidisciplinary study on research designs. The results of the study were published in the esteemed science series of Nature Communications. In addition to Experimental Ecology, the study focused on test designs in Social Sciences. The study is also part of JYU.Wisdom, the super-faculty multidisciplinary School of Resource Wisdom.

Published

28.1.2021

Experimental Ecology research pursued at the Department of Biological and Environmental Science, University of Jyväskylä, is renowned both in Finland and abroad, and it has been going on for over thirty years already. Experimental research investigates basic phenomena of the living nature, especially causal relationships pertaining to interactions between species and to environmental changes in view of the properties and adaptability of organisms and populations as well as the structure and functioning of ecosystems.

Among a large international group of scientists, researchers of the department in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and Universidade do Algarve participated in and contributed to the study by offering the case of a large network for monitoring the restoration of peatlands based on a perfect test design. The main goal of the study was to explore what kinds of test designs are primarily used in Ecology and Social Sciences and how reliable results these test designs yield.

- “The survey revealed that in test designs for studying the temporal impact of a measure implemented in natural settings, i.e. outside laboratories, up to 77% in ecology and 64% in social sciences are based on so-called partial test designs,” says Professor of Ecology Janne Kotiaho, who participated in the study from the Department of Biological and Environmental Science. “Partial test designs lack one of the essential elements of perfect test designs, in simple terms such as treatment and its control as well as pre- and post-assessments (Before-After-Control-Impact or BACI)”.

In this study, perfect test designs were broken up and their results were re-analysed by means of many different partial test designs. The results showed that in comparison to perfect test designs, partial test designs tend to yield more varied results. For some partial test designs, there were even indications of systematic bias. A conclusion of this study was, therefore, that perfect test designs provide more reliable information about the basic natural phenomena under investigation.

- “Perfect BACI test designs are very laborious to realise in natural settings,” Kotiaho says. “They require a multiple number of sample plots and measurements in comparison to partial test designs. This is a likely reason why the more easily implemented, but presumably less reliable partial test designs are dominant in research literature.”

The response of peatland nature to restoration efforts as part of the test design study
At the Department of Biological and Environmental Science, test design expertise has been applied for more than ten years already also to biological research pertaining to nature conservation. One of the department’s perfect test designs relates to the national network for monitoring the restoration of peatlands, which includes about 150 swamps in different parts of Finland. The test setting was established within the EU-funded (6.7 M€) Suoverkosto LIFE project in 2010–2014 in cooperation with Metsähallitus. From the monitored areas, data is still being collected about the water balance and species (e.g. plants and butterflies) of the restored peatlands. Nature is recovering slowly after restoration, which in this case means blocking the trenches and removing the trees grown in the dried terrain. Therefore, a decades-long follow-up period is needed to find out the impacts.

- “Researchers from the University of Cambridge inquired possibilities for cooperation, as they knew that our large setting is globally among the few dozens of perfect BACI designs with sufficient repetitions for the breaking up and re-analysing purposes,” Professor Kotiaho says. “Of course, we engaged in such cooperation and opened our research data to the international research community, because it allows as many people as possible to benefit from our test design and we might increase the reliability of research knowledge in societal decision-making.”

The study as part of JYU.Wisdom
In addition to ecology, the study focused on social sciences. In social sciences, the share of perfect test designs is bigger than in Ecology, but as expected, there were no differences in the reliability rates of test designs between these disciplines. The study is part of the activities of JYU.Wisdom, the super-faculty multidisciplinary School of Resource Wisdom. JYU.Wisdom is a JYU-based network for scientific research and societal influence. It focuses on the issues of sustainability and planetary well-being, i.e. the well-being of humans and other nature.

- “In line with the JYU.Wisdom principles, the article presented multidisciplinary analyses of experimental data from the respective fields of nature conservation biology and Social Sciences,” says Kotiaho. “The article was also contextualised as dealing with the reliability of scientific knowledge within evidence-based societal decision-making.”

The article on the study was published in the internationally esteemed Nature Communications journal on Monday, 11 December 2020.

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