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There and Back Again, or the Problem of Locality in Biodiversity Surveys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ayelet Shavit  and
James Griesemer
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Abstract

We argue that ‘locality’, perhaps the most mundane term in ecology, holds a basic ambiguity: two concepts of space—nomothetic and idiographic—which are both necessary for a rigorous resurvey to “the same” locality in the field, are committed to different practices with no common measurement. A case study unfolds the failure of the standard assumption that an exogenous grid of longitude and latitude, as fine-grained as one wishes, suffices for revisiting a species locality. We briefly suggest a scale-dependent “resolution” for this replication problem, since it has no general, rational solution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 273 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

We thank Eli Gerson, Eva Jablonka, Yemima Ben Menahem for thoroughly reading and improving the manuscript, the MVZ for sharing its valuable archive online, and especially the MVZ people—Steve Beissinger, Carla Cicero, Chris Conroy, Karen Klitz, Michelle Koo, Bill Monahan, Juan Luis Parra, Jim Patton, John Perrine, John Wieczorek, and the director Craig Moritz—for their time, openness, scientific integrity, and warm hospitality, both indoors and outdoors.

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