International Biological Program

The International Biological Program, German International Biological Program (abbreviated IBP) was an ecological research program from 1964 to 1974 for the first time, the approaches of major research have been applied to the ecology in him.. Although the program was considered by many scientists as a result, rather than failure, and were associated with him any groundbreaking advances in knowledge, it was of high importance for the organization and management of ecological large-scale research to date.

History of the program

After the great success of the International Geophysical Year 1957/1958 noted numerous biologists that the ecology of a similar program could benefit greatly. As part of the IGY some biological studies had already been carried out, but downstream (especially in Antarctica ) and to a lesser extent. Head of the organizing committee for the new project was the British developmental biologist Conrad Hal Waddington. Continuity with the IGY was prepared by the oceanographers Roger Revelle. Launch of the IBP was a conference in Paris in 1964. Due to the complexity of the data collection, the limitation to a single year was discarded. The aim was initially a period of about 5 to 7 years. The unifying theme for the project were the " biological foundations of productivity and human welfare ." The concept of ecology was still exotic and outside the specialized science virtually unknown, so the program title was introduced as "biological " program.

The operational phase of the program began in 1967. The program was designed to be international, in each country a national committee under the leadership of the respective Academy of Sciences ( in Germany the German Research Foundation ) guided them the work and coordinated, a central funding or benefit not exist. Most ambitious part of the program was a deliberate, basic inventory of biocoenotic relationships, food webs, and energy and material flows for all biomes. In the world's most extensive sub-project in the U.S. Tundra were ( in Point Barrow, Alaska), deserts ( in Curley Valley, Utah), boreal coniferous forest (Valley of the Cedar River, near Seattle and HJAndrews Experimental Forest in Oregon ), deciduous forest (different areas) and grassland / prairie ( Fort Collins, Colorado) edited. European contributions were held in almost all countries, with deciduous forests were the focus of interest. German contribution was the Solling project here. Important individual projects existed, for example, in Denmark ( Rotbuchenwald in Aarhus ), in England ( Meathop Wood), Czechoslovakia ( Forest of Bab ) and Poland ( Bialowieza Forest ). It was intended to decrypt each the entire ecosystem in its function and model.

Research approaches

The focus of the International Biological Programme was on the recovery of large, if possible, even more comprehensive data sets with quantitative data from the studied model systems. This evaluation should be the basis for the understanding of, and ultimately the modeling of the entire system. Included methods used remote sensing data, such as by infrared photography, radar and sonar and measurement of material flows and trophic interactions through controlled introduction of artificial isotopes. In many sub-projects for the first time the abiotic site conditions, weather (including the stock weather in the interior of forests ), growth and element concentrations as well as basic biological inventories of the entire range of species have been tackled.

Problems

From the beginning it was a problem of the program, that data collection between the various individual projects was not uniform and standardized. However, this was mainly because that such standard methods simply did not exist, in part, they have been re- developed as part of the project. The planning of a central database could not be realized, the existing data were not stored in a unified format. The ambitious expectations to get entire ecosystems by means of Cybernetics and Systems Analysis in the handle failed largely due to the complexity of the data. The mathematical modeling of ecosystems proved to be a far more difficult problem than originally hoped and was ( with the exception of some extremely species-poor arctic habitats ) with the former techniques and methods ultimately unreachable. In terms of the original objectives and expectations, the project was an almost complete failure.

If not you a bit pompous rhetoric and the wide-ranging objectives of the initial phase of the foundation, but successful research was carried out under the program in many places entirely. Perhaps the most important consequence of the program it is today, that were out at numerous universities and research institutions working groups of Ecology and Ecosystem Research, which partially characterize this young discipline today.

Follow-up projects

Developed as part of the International Biological Programme research approaches were then continued partly in altered form. In the U.S., was the most important follow-up project, the Long-Term Ecological Research program ( LTER ) for the long-term ecological research. International many projects in the UNESCO MAB program has continued.

Swell

• Elena Aronova, Karen S. Baker, Naomi Oreskes (2010 ): Big Science and Big Data in Biology: From the International Geophysical Year through the International Biological Program to the Long Term Ecological Research ( LTER ) Network, 1957 -Present, in: Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences Vol 40, No. 2: 183-224.
• PMBoffey (1976 ): International biological program: Was it worth the cost and effort? Science Vol 193 no 4256: 866-868.
• Heinz Ellenberg, Robert Mayer, Jürgen Roustabout: Ecosystem research. Results of the Solling project 1966-1986. Stuttgart (Ulmer Verlag) 1986. Chap. 1.2: " The International Biological Programme" ( p. 20).