1. Joern Fischer
Email: jfischer@leuphana.de Blog: http://ideas4sustainability.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @ideas4sust
Is big data a big dead-end?
Image source: http://catholicecology.blogspot.de/2013/07/data-series-no-1-on-pharmaceuticals-and.html

2. A critical view on big data
Rewards for papers with a global focus
Rewards for quantitative sophistication
Examples:
Meta-analyses increasing at expense of traditional reviews
Quantitatively elegant analyses increasing – even on questions
long deemed inadequate (e.g. global yield gaps)
What kinds of students/papers/projects/questions are now successful?
Are those the students/papers/projects/question that we really need?
Fischer J, Hanspach J, Hartel T (2011). Continental-scale ecology versus landscape-scale
case studies. Frontiers Ecol. Environm. doi:10.1890/11.WB.021

3. A critical view on big data
Rewards for papers with a global focus
Rewards for quantitative sophistication
Examples:
Meta-analyses increasing at expense of traditional reviews
Quantitatively elegant analyses increasing – even on questions
long deemed inadequate (e.g. global yield gaps)
What kinds of students/papers/projects/questions are now successful?
Are those the students/papers/projects/question that we really need?
Fischer J, Hanspach J, Hartel T (2011). Continental-scale ecology versus landscape-scale
case studies. Frontiers Ecol. Environm. doi:10.1890/11.WB.021

4. A critical view on big data
See Lindenmayer and Likens on “losing the culture of ecology“
Relative
citeability
of global
scale work
Publication
bias
favouring
big data
Loss of
field work
Emphasis
on big data
skills
Loss of
field skills
(“culture of
ecology”)
Loss of
understanding of
regional
complexities
Top-down, quantitative worldview
Loss of
appreciation of
local-scale
phenomena
and those
that defy
quantification

5. How does that fit with the “big problems” of our times?
13.04.2011 5
Source: Fischer et al. (2007). Mind the sustainability gap. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, 612-624.

6. Sustainability and human behavior
Some „ultimate‟ drivers of un-sustainability relate to:
Population & consumption
Equity & fairness
Institutions (political, economic, civil society)
Value and belief systems
These are not things we need to quantify in more detail!
Source: Fischer et al. 2012. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

7. Solutions
Challenge “big data”, and focus instead on
What are the big problems?
What is the nature of these problems?
What, therefore, must be the nature of the understanding that we
must generate?
What kinds of students/papers/projects/questions do we hence
need to generate?
Personally, I believe in synthesis and collaboration
For some questions, big data will be helpful
For many others, it will be a distraction from more important issues

8. “Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which
is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question,
which can always be made precise.”
John Tukey
The future of data analysis. Annals of Mathematical
Statistics 33 (1), (1962), page 13.
In summary …