Often, forest death is patchy, and research is difficult because of the large areas involved.
A further recent analysis published in HARPS shows that even where there has been progress in a country such as India, it can be very patchy and research capacity still needs to be strengthened in many parts of the country [ 12].
Patchy quality of research training that leaves some new doctorates ill-equipped for a career either in academia or industry was another concern raised by the Roberts Review.
Alison Garnham, the outgoing chief executive of the Daycare Trust, a childcare campaign group, believes that the jury is still out, and that the evidence is still patchy, pointing out that research highlighting the negative consequences of group care is not accompanied by parallel research looking at the impact of childminders and nannies.
There is even less understanding of microorganisms and only limited and patchy knowledge of zooplankton; research on zooplankton ecology has increased recently, but is not yet finding its way into OBIS.
At the moment, though, China's research record is patchy, with too many trivial and pointless "me too" studies, and a disturbing amount of outright fraud.
In African rangelands where scientific research is often patchy or non-existent, the pastoral communities have continued to rely on their systems of indigenous knowledge of rangeland management to make decisions that influence their livelihoods (Leach et al. 1999; Kyagaba 2004; Mapinduzi et al. 2003; Palmer and Wadley 2007; Angassa and Oba 2008; Roba and Oba 2009).
Our findings that the overall provision of acupuncture in the NHS is patchy are consistent with previous research.
A major limitation of global analyses is that research effort is extremely patchy in space.
Future research could incorporate the patchy projection model of Voges et al. (2010a, b) into our slice model to investigate how patchy connectivity affects network activity and resultant LFP across the slice.
