Methodological Meddling

Long term monitoring data is hard to come by. It's expensive, time-consuming, difficult and usually requires an expert. When someone comes up with a new whizz bang method that promises to change your world, you should upgrade, improve your techniques, do cutting edge science right? Wrong. If new methods offer substantially lower cost and/or increased accuracy, it is all to tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater when keeping up with the scientific Joneses.


I work with other people's data. Lots of it. The limiting factors for good inference in population monitoring is the number and timespan of viable datasets. After funding, the single biggest factor limiting the timespan of data is changed methods.

So, if I can offer you one suggestion it is this:

Don't change.

If you must, or it seems wise to change, then index the old methods to the new, otherwise you are rendering all that time effort and money spent previously useless*. (not totally, but it is much less valuable).

Biodiversity Buy-off

Insert rant here about inappropriate offsets. Bribery with research money pre and post project. Think they are above the law.

BHP and GBR - Gladstone.
Newlands Projects expansion into offset.
Paying for a breach of protocols and the pollution of a hydrological system by... PAYING FOR RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTS OF RUINING THE SYSTEM. See document form of this. Am shaping for a piece on The Conversation.

The thing about counterfactuals...

Counterfactuals are:

Adaptive management and counterfactuals...

so does my fox baiting work?
ok... I'll try to measure my inputs, the direct outcomes (dead foxes/ fox population) and the indirect/desired biological outcomes (small mammal, bird etc populations)

this will hopefully tell me whether there is a change in either of those factors... (although it might not - see "when to stop monitoring paper" and foxes stuff by Jess (Walsh?)

even if it does.. and if my method appears to be working (i.e. dead foxes) I still have a problem... other things have changed too... so I can't say whether my e.g. bilby population has increased as a result of the foxes being dead, or because something else, like the climate or competitor density has changed. I can make some inferences, but even then there are difficulties... i.e. ok, so climate and foxes have a likely impact... but how much of the impact is due to fox baiting?

what you need is a counterfactual... a "similar" area where fox baiting is not going on and the climate is changing in the same way where you can also look at the bilbies... et voila!!

there are some problems with this though... what if there are no counterfactuals...
e.g. Rhinos... there are zeros everywhere outside of managed zones... how does one evaluate zeros?? this is hard... LPI is probs conservative because populations that decline to zero (or v. close to it) drop out of the line.

e.g. Funding, access, infrastructure etc... all the things you have on public lands that maybe you won't be able to get on "counterfactual lands"... if they exist that is

e.g. Smart use of resources... do we really want to spend money on monitoring random pieces of land etc with little conservation value?? The short answer is YES (at least sometimes 0 see Ferraro piece). Example - when concerted mammal and fire monitoring data was collected and examined in NT they realised that their fire management was flawed and causing small mammal declines!!





So what if there actually ISN'T a counterfactual, or even, what if the counterfactuals available are not entirely appropriate?

A little bit of creative flair

In between the models i played with some word art.... I like tagxedo because it's free, you don't have to sign in, and you get to pick whatever shapes you want: www.tagxedo.com. This one is my lit review... so if you were wondering what i read and write about in my research... its all here.

On listening...

So some friends of mine are doing something pretty cool. They are starting a business that might just start a travelution. I have to say, some of my best adventures have been those where i have been hosted by real live locals, and if they pull it off (and i am sure they will because they are creative, ethical, and driven), it will be pretty awesome. So they hang out here: http://talkingaboutatravelution.blogspot.com/at the moment, and their mission, once accomplished, will hang out here: www.arribaaa.com (I think).

In any case they are also pretty insightful people and i finally got around to giving myself some time to read and think lately, which resulted in reading their blog. I am sure that this was time that i could have spent reading science itself but well... perhaps not.

Vinko wrote a post about "listening":

http://talkingaboutatravelution.blogspot.com/2011/10/necessity-of-listening.html

As i read it, and some of the other things on their blog, i pondered. I have been doing a lot of analysis lately, and i look a bit like the chick in the third frame of this comic: (when i find it again, i will post it here), so whilst it runs, i can ponder just a little, a luxury (yes luxury) that i do not often allow myself. A spate of dragon books have come out recently and i have also been reading them, another luxury that i don't get much time for lately. In any case upon reflection I started to think about the "water cooler effect", the phenomena wherein it seems as if all the good ideas arrive over morning tea or other coffee breaks, beers or other varied activities that involve hanging out and chatting with people who think about the same sorts of things you do... or things which link to or bear on the things you think about. It seems the same reason that people always come back from conferences and workshops motivated and idea filled... it's all about focused listening!

Reflection doesn't hurt either, and i think it comes from the same place, focusing on something makes it clearer.

and to end... something i found interesting today...

"There's nothing wrong with having a plan. Plans are great. But missions are better. Missions survive when plans almost always fail."
- Seth Godin

The beginning...

Ok, so this is going to be my place to practice writing my thoughts in a clear, concise manner. I can't promise that it will be that great to start off with, but i am sure it will get better over time. It is a place where I get to use big words, play around with images, rant, and mull over the thoughts that have occurred to me recently.

What is the conserverse? It is a conglomerate of "conservation" "conversation" and universe.

Basically, this blog is a conversation about conservation, with a few random thoughts thrown in. In particular, it is my personal brand of conservation and a reflection on some of the things rattlling around in my idea.

Every man and his dog has a blog these days, and i certainly don't have the time to keep this current at the moment... and perhaps no more blogs are needed. However, some thoughts have occurred to me that i feel the urge to spout, and every day that i spend working on my PhD, i realise that a mass media platform is one of the best things someone can own! I mean, look at Corey Bradshaw's blog - everyone knows it, and him, and he gets to spruik his science in an easy to access kind way. It also becomes more apparent to me that it is perhaps not only a benefit, but a responsibility to communicate what we find with the world.

Thus.... I begin.