Ecologists are spending less time in the field. That could be a problem.

There was a time when an ecologist’s education was not complete without the mud of a marsh on their boots or the scent of damp earth after a rainforest downpour. Increasingly, however, the discipline is moving indoors. A paper published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution by Masashi Soga and Kevin J. Gaston highlights a disconcerting trend: the decline of …