Synthesis is an important activity for scientific advancement, and BioScience fills an important publishing niche for synthesis in ecology and conservation biology. In the mid-1990s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) established the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) to foster collaboration among researchers and to encourage the use of existing data to seek general patterns and principles beyond what can be learned from site-specific studies. At the time, this was a shocking and novel initiative. In a recent BioScience article, Halpern and colleagues (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa105) reviewed the history of synthesis, noting its ubiquity in ecology and arguing that NCEAS has played a critical role in accelerating knowledge. Indeed, NCEAS was so successful that the NSF established additional synthesis centers for social–ecological systems, mathematical biology, and evolution. It is important to recognize, however, that the process of synthesis is built on multiple foundations, including the development of data repositories, metadata standards and ecoinformatics, advances in statistical methods (e.g., meta-analysis, R), and changes in culture and behavior among scientists.

中文翻译：

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生态综合

合成是科学进步的重要活动，而生物科学填补了生态学和保护生物学领域合成的重要出版领域。在1990年代中期，美国国家科学基金会（NSF）成立了国家生态分析与综合中心（NCEAS），以促进研究人员之间的合作，并鼓励利用现有数据寻求可从中学到的东西之外的一般模式和原理。特定地点的研究。当时，这是一个令人震惊的新颖举措。在最近的生物科学中Halpern及其同事（https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa105）在一篇文章中回顾了合成的历史，指出了合成在生态学中的普遍性，并认为NCEAS在加速知识发展方面发挥了关键作用。确实，NCEAS非常成功，以至于NSF建立了更多的社会生态系统，数学生物学和进化综合中心。然而认识到的是，它是重要的过程合成的构建在多个基金会，包括数据储存库，元数据标准和生态信息学，在统计方法（例如，元分析，进步的发展- [R ），并在培养的变化和科学家之间的行为。