The roles of natural history during ecological research

It is commonly posited that natural history is an essentially descriptive activity focused on local case studies, lacking an explicit link with theory. Still, some authors suggest that patient observation of natural history must be valued as ‘an essential first step in the scientific method’. We think that there is a strong connection between ecology and natural history, and thus delve into such relationship to propose that a) natural history observations are necessary for science problematization (i.e., for the detection of meaningful ecological research problems) and, in some specific contexts, for generating low-level or pattern hypotheses. Notwithstanding, these natural history observations themselves play a secondary role in inspiring explanatory, mechanismic or theoretical hypotheses, and b) a fundamental role of natural history during ecological research is to provide key assumptions (i.e., initial conditions) used to define the experimental design and collect the appropriate data, as well as to deduce hypotheses and predictions. This latter function fruitfully articulates natural history with ecological theory.