We were originally funded for the possibility of 11 years, and we were told there wouldn’t be funding after that. Last year, the NSF agreed to allow us to submit a renewal proposal, and so we’ll be doing that, asking for another five years of support.

That’s a good question. The general philosophy at NSF is that they don’t fund anything forever. At the same time, there are these institutes called Science and Technology Centers, and they also have an 11-year life span. On the other hand, I’ve never been able to find out why it’s 11, rather than, say, 10 or 12.

We’re located off campus in Santa Barbara. The physical facility has offices and meeting rooms and then we have a core staff of about 11 people. Half of those are office staff and the other half are computing staff. They support three main activities that we conduct here. We have sabbatical visitors that we fund—six a year. We do working groups, which are usually of four to 20 people who come in for a week at a time, maybe twice a year each for two years. And so that’s usually about 500 to 800 people each year, on average 85 to 90 meetings a year.

One year we had 130 meetings. It was constant.

We fund about 18 post-docs a year. The sabbatical visitors and post-docs are sort of our resident scientists, but they rotate every six months to three years. There are people coming and going all time. Then on top of that are 500 to 800 people who visit for a week at a time. I am the only faculty member associated with the University who is a part of the Center.

This is kind of interesting. The only papers that are going to show up in the ESI database as NCEAS are those in which the resident scientists, which means always one of the post-docs, is one of the authors. And that will be only one-third of the papers that come out of NCEAS. The other two-thirds come from the working groups, which are composed of scientists from all over the world. They will mention NCEAS in the acknowledgements, but NCEAS will not be part of the address. So the citation numbers would be quite a bit higher if the algorithm acknowledged those articles done at NCEAS, but as part of the working groups. One thing to remember about this center is that it’s very diverse. We have had people from 43 countries, 49 states, and hundreds and hundreds of institutions.

I get that question a lot. Rather than ask you to guess, I’ll just tell you. It’s North Dakota.

  How do you choose post-docs and resident scientists?

For all three—working groups, sabbaticals, and post-docs—they submit short proposals. These are evaluated by a review board of 19 people, and we choose from that. For working groups and post-docs, we fund about 20% of the proposals. We get 20 or 25 proposals a year, and fund three to five of them. We fund a higher percent of the sabbaticals, probably more like 50 or 60%.

They can. In some cases, post-docs are formally associated with a working group. In most cases, they have the opportunity to participate, just because they’re here and so is the working group. They can get involved with up to 10 working groups each. The range has gone from one to 10. So it’s more opportunistic than planned or organized. The post-docs have been by far the most successful piece here, but it’s the most different approach. They’re essentially mentor-less, but they can get involved with any of these hundreds of people who come through every year.

The quality has gone up, definitely. Now when we get post-docs, they often get job interviews within a few weeks of arriving. We haven’t had any impact in that way, so I suspect we’re getting better post-docs to start with. Topically, we have spread out a bit. We’ve done some projects in ecological economics, for instance. One really interesting working group was on how the use of metaphors affects the study of ecology and evolution.

One model system we looked at was invasive species. The notion that something is invasive, bad, alien, and crosses our borders almost verges on the idea of homeland security, in terms of how conservationists and ecologists feel the need to protect our borders. There are a lot of militaristic metaphors in that way.

It’s really hard to say because the diversity of topics has just been astonishing—everything from evolution and microbial ecology up through global issues. Some have higher profiles than others. The most-cited paper in the ESI list is a paper on over-fishing oceans (Jackson, J.B.C., et al., "Historical overfishing and the recent collapse of coastal ecosystems," Science 293[5530]: 629-38, 27 July 2001). It was a cover article in Science. One of the other ones was a large project on the design of marine reserves—these are like national parks in the oceans. The difference between those and terrestrial national parks is that virtually everything in the national parks that lives there was born there. In the ocean, virtually nothing that lives in any one spot was born there. So you can’t just put a fence around a piece of the ocean, like you can a terrestrial reserve. So the scientists in this group and one of our post-docs worked out parameters associated with that and just coincidentally, at about that same time, the management plan for the Santa Barbara channel was being revised, and the plan included marine reserves. And so the scientists involved in our project were called upon to help develop the recommendations, and then they went through a long approval process, and eventually, within three years, there were actually marine reserves in the water just five miles from my office. That had a big impact; it went from academic science to in-the-water application.

It’s awkward to say this, but no, I don’t think we’d do much differently. The basic system works; that is, using existing data, bringing people in for focused opportunities to collaborate, a mix of post-docs, sabbatical visitors, and working groups. We haven’t tested other proportions for that mixture, but this model seems to be quite productive. One thing is that we do have a very large side effort on ecological informatics research. Ecological data is very heterogeneous and distributed, and this program works to make it accessible. In conjunction with that, one thing I would have done differently is to have more support for analytical assistance and data access and management. By analytical, I mean statistical modeling and that kind of thing.

We don’t fund field works, but obviously there is data that comes out of NCEAS that are new: the results of models, say, or integrative synthesis of data sets. But we don’t support the acquisition of new data sets. That’s just the nature of the place. It’s designed to be a synthesis center for existing data. That was explicitly the purpose. The job of gathering new data is supported by tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars from other sources.

There are some very interesting sociological studies of our center. We are both a product of and have had an impact on the nature of collaboration in a cultural, sociological sense. That’s been a very big change and, again, we can’t claim credit for that entirely. Something was going on already that suggested that this was an appropriate way to do things and it led to the formation of NCEAS. But we have certainly catalyzed at least the type of synthesis and collaboration we carry on here. I think what we see happening over the next five years is two main things: one is increased collaboration as mediated through a kind of broader access to data information. So as these data sets become available and the culture shifts to make the data more accessible, there’s just going to be huge amounts of information available that are just not available now. In the simplest sense, one way I think about it is this is going to be really valuable when the data starts to be used for reasons for which it was not originally intended: either as surrogates for something or representing some other manifestation of the information. I think the other area in which things are changing is that students these days are much more interested in conservation and resource management. I think we will see a lot more of what used to be called applied ecology, but I think it’s sound ecology applied to resource management and conservation.

The hottest thing we’re doing right now is on the ecology of infectious disease. The last two meetings of our initial project are going to happen in the next few months and we have newer projects coming out just beginning on this topic. These would be subjects like how disease affects efforts at conservation of restoration or of natural habitats, or how global climate change affects disease and so forth.

We occasionally are proactive. The ecology of infectious disease started out that way. I was at a meeting about six years ago and a friend of mine was working at the time on Lyme disease, and I suggested he should submit a proposal. He did, and it was such a big topic it spun off into four topical areas, three of which generated proposals that were also successful. We’ve done some really interesting stuff on parasites; the idea is that one of the reasons invasive species are so successful is that they get transported from one continent to another and they have no germs or pathogens to infect them in their new home. They’re released from all this pressure back home. The question is whether that’s the case. Do invaders get a free ride for a while? There’s been a very interesting study on that. How many parasites do they bring with them? How many new parasites do they pick up? When will that affect them, etc? That paper was published in Science last year.

It’s completely up to the authors. We’ve had publishers approach us about starting a synthesis series, focusing on the kind of synthesis we do. But since our authors have never had a problem getting stuff published, we haven’t gone out of our way to do that.

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
Santa Barbara, CA, USA