Ecology seems to be approaching an explosion of understanding. While the last century gave us lots of neat computing tools (matrix calculations actually became doable! statistical tests on thousands of points of data! elevation models that didn’t take 4 years to digitize by hand!), to address the true complexity of the natural world requires something much more powerful. On the one hand, we need a better understanding of systems. There’s this thing — you might have heard of it — called the internet that has exploded our understanding of networks (‘Network Theory: A Key to Unraveling How Nature Works’, Carl Zimmer). Now it’s a matter of continuing to translate that into our research.

Networks are complex. I believe the current average for food web connections modeled is on the order of 10². That’s it? Can we reliably say we have an understanding of nature if we don’t imagine what happens as that number approaches the infinite? I expect we’d find an entirely different set of behaviors. But how do we begin test any of that, or gather data? How about designing a National Ecological Observatory Network? Sweet! How about getting $20 million in funding to get it started from the new Obama budget? Awesome. Or you could start tracking every tiger death in India.Or an application to map sudden oak death from your iPhone?

Networks are also resilient. But I suppose the thing that keeps most ecologists up at night is the fact that we’re on this threshold of technology that will dramatically reshape our understanding of how the world works. And the tragedy is that all of those intricate connections might all collapse before we have a chance to really get it.