At Cecil, we take a scientific approach to nature data.
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Scientific concepts
Learn about the concepts we support and why we use them to curate datasets.
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Resources
Scientific guidelines and reference materials for working with the Cecil platform.
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What is a scientific approach?
At its core, a scientific approach is one that is founded on core scientific principles [US National Academy of Sciences 1992] of objectivity, transparency, and rigour. We adopt these principles at Cecil — which we believe is the only way to build trust in the datasets we support.
When it comes to nature data itself, a scientific approach is one that is underpinned by environmental science. Nature encompasses all living and non-living parts of an ecosystem. Ecosystems are profoundly complex, comprising many thousands of interacting components:
- Abiotic conditions → e.g. climate, geology, topography, and hydrology.
- Ecosystem structure → e.g. land cover, biomass, biodiversity, and soil carbon stocks.
- Ecosystem functioning → e.g. biogeochemical cycles, fire dynamics, and crop yield.
- Emergent system behaviour → e.g. lags and feedbacks, stress resistance or resilience, and dynamic equilibria.
Environmental science offers a strong basis for understanding this complexity. Among other things, environmental science has taught us that:
- Ecosystems deliver an abundance of services that create a safe living space for people (e.g. CO₂ capture through photosynthesis, water filtration, and provision of food and medicines) [IPBES 2019].
- Ecosystems are made of the same stuff → plants, animals, microbes, soil, water, carbon, and nutrients… as well as the conditions that limit them and the interactions that bind them.
- Ecosystems follow consistent rules at large scales (e.g. latitude-based tree lines [Körner 1998]) and small scales (e.g. enzyme activities [Sinsabaugh et al. 2008]).
- Local context changes how these rules behave at the site scale [Walker et al. 2019].