Many workers define ecology as the science that explains the abundance and distribution of species. Despite a century of work on questions surrounding this, the field has only a rudimentary grasp on the factors that are important. Rick Karban (Dept. of Entomology) has been censusing populations of wooly bear caterpillars in the Bodega Bay area for 25 years however, there is relatively little in the way of understanding the factors that produce patterns in abundance and distribution.
