The Ecotron Facility at Silwood Park: The Value of "Big Bottle" Experiments

The Ecotron consists of 16 physically and electronically integrated environmental chambers, housed in the Centre for Population Biology at Silwood Park (Ascot, England). It allows ecologists to construct and run replicate miniature terrestrial ecosystems for many months under controlled environmental conditions. The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) provided the funds to construct the Ecotron and supports its running costs. A detailed description of the facility is in Lawton et al. (1993). The first two experiments conducted in it are described by Thompson et al. (1993), and by Naeem et al. (1994, 1995) (see also Cherfas 1994, Kareiva 1994). Here, I briefly describe the facility, emphasizing its unique features, what it cost to build, and how much it costs to run, before providing a r6sume of the results that have been obtained with it so far. The rest of the paper is devoted to a detailed consideration of what ecologists can and cannot learn from working in such a facility the sort of studies that Kareiva (1989) called "bottle experiments," but on a rather grand scale.