Ecology in Context: A Conceptual Model for Analyzing the Significance of Context in Ecological Research

This paper proposes a conceptual model for analyzing context-dependent ecological phenomena. Many ecological processes, from relatively simple species interactions to biological invasions, are systematically dependent on the environmental context and can lead to entirely different outcomes depending on the circumstances in which they occur. Because of this, causal relations that hold in one ecosystem may not hold or even reverse in another, raising far-reaching concerns about the validity of causal inference and the extent to which causal relationships can be stable across different environments. However, despite the importance of context for causal inference and transferability and the frequency of reports of context-dependent results in the ecological literature, until recently, the concept of context has rarely been theorized. This paper fills this gap by providing a conceptual model that can serve as a common framework for considering different types of conditions and their different roles in the occurrence of ecological phenomena.