Thursday, March 3, 2011

Politics and science

I haven't read (yet) Scott Creel and Jay Rotella's article that is at the heart of this controversy, but I can feel for them. It is necessary to make assumptions when constructing a population model - and if you make different assumptions you'll get different results. The fact that the paper is peer-reviewed increases my confidence that their assumptions are defensible. Unfortunately, the results are not politically palatable! I'm looking forward to digging into their study in detail.

2 comments:

  1. Hasn't there been a decades long debate in the Mallard literature examining whether harvest is compensated for or additive? Maybe what Idaho and Montana need is an adaptive harvest management plan with competing models, etc. I bet we could just take the duck models and change some parameter values.

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  2. Maybe - but not in my opinion. See my latest post here.

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