Early Projects

2010 – 2020

There were several early projects starting our work on what has later become the Hi Knowledge initiative. In March 2010, we organised the workshop “Tackling the emerging crisis of invasion biology: How can ecological theory, experiments, and field studies be combined to achieve major progress?” in Benediktbeuern, Germany, in the context of the specialist group “Theory in Ecology” of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (GfÖ; see Heger et al. 2013). The idea of the hierarchy-of-hypotheses (HoH) approach emerged from fruitful discussions during this workshop and our parallel work on the study “Support for major hypotheses in invasion biology is uneven and declining” (Jeschke et al. 2012), with the main funder Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the project “Combining bottom-up and top-down analyses to test fundamental concepts in invasion biology”.

A DFG Heisenberg grant from from 2014 to 2019 allowed us to develop and apply network analysis and web-based approaches to synthesize hypotheses and data in invasion biology and related disciplines. During this time period, we worked on the book “Invasion Biology: Hypotheses and Evidence” (Jeschke & Heger 2018). We thought it would be cool to have an interactive website complementing the book, and we decided to call this website “Hi Knowledge”. In parallel, we worked on “Dark Knowledge” (Jeschke et al. 2019), and Martin Enders had started his doctoral thesis “Creating and evaluating hypothesis networks in invasion biology” funded by the Foundation of German Business (sdw) and the BMBF in the context of the project Bridging in Biodiversity Science. Martin Enders and collaborators explored and evaluated different approaches to create hypothesis networks, using invasion biology as an example. Two of these hypothesis networks can be interactively explored in our Hi Knowledge website: (i) Enders & Jeschke (2018), which was published in the first version of the Hi Knowledge website to complement the above-mentioned book, and (ii) Enders et al. (2020).

In 2017 and 2018, we organised a series of three symposia in Hanover, Germany, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung with a focus on the HoH approach. We had inspiring discussions in these symposia with researchers from different fields as well as artists and designers. Several ideas emerged from these discussions, which also allowed us to further improve the HoH approach (Heger et al. 2021).