Convener: Tina Heger (Berlin)

Making ecological knowledge usable is key for addressing the global biodiversity crisis. It is far from obvious, however, how to best approach this aim. In an interdisciplinary setting including ecologists, data scientists, computational linguists, and philosophers, the ZiF Resident Group “Mapping Evidence to Theory in Ecology” currently explores ways for extracting ecological knowledge from scientific papers and other sources (e.g. local and indigenous knowledge), representing it in the form of causal network graphs, linking it to evidence and providing means to interact with this integrated knowledge. The envisioned goal is the ‘EcoWeaveR’, a digital platform for synthesizing and representing ecological knowledge that can better support theorizing and restoration action in ecology.