'I rarely get outside': scientists ditch fieldwork in the age of AI

Summary

Tadeo Ramirez-Parada studied the timing of plant flowering for his PhD — but he didn’t touch a single petal. Instead, he developed a machine-learning algorithm to analyse the digitized captions of one million herbarium specimens, which showed him how flowering times are changing with rising temperatures.Ramirez-Parada’s work has helped to solve an important mystery in ecology — showing that as temperatures change, plants shift their flowering times to cope with the heat, rather than adapting through natural selection1. Yet his work so far has been almost entirely computer-based. “I have had to do very little experimental or field work,” says Ramirez-Parada, who did his PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Ecologists: don’t lose touch with the joy of fieldworkRamirez-Parada’s work is typical of a change that is reaching into every part of ecology. Whatever scientists are analysing — digitized specimens, images of the natural world, DNA samples, or data streaming in from sensors — many are doing it indoors.The technologies are creating a world that can be monitored at times, places and scales that were previously unimaginable. We are moving towards the “fully automated monitoring of ecological communities”, wrote Marc Besson, a marine scientist at the Sorbonne University Ocean Observatory in Banyuls-sur-Mer, France, in a 2022 paper2.Many ecologists say this revolution offers huge potential for understanding the biodiversity crisis and discerning patterns of global change.But some ecologists are dismayed. They feel that the discipline is losing intimacy with its subject matter. They argue that field experience is in decline, and that this loss could lead to error, bias and oversimplification of results.“If it becomes a world where you don’t actually have to go out in order to become an ecologist, we kind of lose sight of what the actual world is like,” says Bill Sutherland, who studies conservation biology at the University of Cambridge, UK.Always onLike ...