Community ecology is beset with difficulties in making predictions and is prone to numerous "hot topics" that have ended up as false leads in the quest to understand patterns and processes in complex groups of interacting organisms.
Instead, epidemics always involve interactions among genes, ecology, climate and human behavior, presenting profound difficulties for scientists trying to tease apart the contributing factors.
But to a great extent, difficulties also arise because community ecology studies have traditionally been skewed towards relatively long-lived vertebrate groups, or are restricted to short study periods due to logistical constraints, especially in the tropics [ 8, 9].
However, some studies have convincingly overcome these difficulties and have successfully linked host ecology and investment into immune defences.
"The species is in difficulty," Jean-Louis Borloo, the French ecology minister, told journalists in Paris on Wednesday.
The technical difficulties could thus partially explain why soil ecology makes a parsimonious use of models and evolutionary rationales and why soil ecology has developed partially independently of general ecology.
The difficulties were further compounded by students' low prior knowledge in ecology as indicated by their low ecology pre-test scores.
The major difficulties have more to do with the fact that ecology is a relatively young science, and there is much that we don't yet understand about it, says Polasky, echoing colleagues.
Figure 6 shows that students generally had fewer difficulties with domain knowledge in kinematics (activities 1 4) than in ecology (activities 5 7).
Moisture is believed to be an influential factor in the growth and dispersal of Blastomyces, although the precise ecology of the organism is not well understood, partly because of the difficulties associated with its recovery from the environment (2 ).
