Yes and No. Yes ecologists take more time to collect data. However ecology is much cheaper than mol. biology. Essentially its ecology = manpower vs mol. biolog

Yes and No. Yes ecologists take more time to collect data. However ecology is much cheaper than mol. biology. Essentially its ecology = manpower vs mol. biology = manpower + expensive technology + expensive chemistry. Also ecology has been one of the most resistant fields to sharing data whereas genomics (the big data end of mol. biology) has been the most enthusiastic. There was a vey noticeable divide in opinion on twitter when PLOS journals mooted making authors make all their data public. I think this is precisely because ecologists invest so much on collecting their field data, so they become possessive. Ecologists can become very senior PI by essentially owning a long term ecological study and assigning their students to continuing it. Genomics and to a lesser extent Mol. Biol. has been keener recently to share as there is a strong open source ethos coming in from the computing side - and it is often a very expensive multi-centre, multi-agency collaboration.