Data availability for macroecology: how to get more out of regular ecological papers

摘要

There is an urgent need to discover global ecological principles. Similarly, known ecological rules should be checked for generality across biogeographical and climatic regions. Summarizing a large number of ecological papers can successfully reveal this macroecological information. Nowadays, however, ecological journals do not provide much suitable data for such generalizations. in a literature meta-study about the relationship between plant diversity and soil acidity, 22 papers from the Journal of Ecology were used, besides papers from other journals. Here I analyzed the dates and geographical coverage of these papers. Most of papers with usable data were from 1960s and 1970s, although the popularity of soil pH-plant diversity topic has generally increased in time. In the more recent studies the actual data were rarely available. Papers from exotic regions peaked in 1970 and from 1988 there were no articles from outside Europe or North America. This is indicating a shift in publishing tradition in ecology. Nowadays small-scale works from well-studied regions predominate and very little broader descriptive data have been provided in regular ecological papers. This will make it difficult to perform good global generalizations in the future. We can, however, have more ecological data for large-scale generalizations if more background data are put in Electronic Archives or Supplementary Appendixes on the Internet. I strongly suggest it for most regular ecological papers. (c) 2006 Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.