Modeling Approaches in Avian Conservation and the Role of Field Biologists

Abstract

This article is a U.S. government work, and is not subject to copyright in the United States. From the EditorLike many members of the American Ornithologists' Union, I developed a passion for birds early in life and have been trying to make a living from this passion ever since. As you get to know fellow AOU members, particularly over drinks, you hear stories about that moment in their lives when they discovered this incredible feeling about birds that could not be ignored. Some of us started at age six or seven, others in high school or college.Some of us, lacking the artistic skills of David Sibley or the humor of Pete Dunne, have had to fall back on doing research. Our field work allows us to earn a paycheck in pursuit of our passion. We get to see and catch and count birds in what are sometimes exciting, and hopefully always interesting, places. We are paid to write reports, scientific papers, and books that present our results from the field. In many cases, our work has direct or indirect implications for bird conservation.Unfortunately, we cannot simply write papers about anything that catches our fancy. Rather, we need to justify our work on the basis of prior studies and present our results using up-to-date methodologies. For many of us, this is where the ugly concepts of hypotheses, models, and statistics come into play and turn our lives of passion into actual work and sometimes drudgery. During my career, the profession has become more and more based on the testing of models, usually with associated quantitative measures. I took a single statistics course during eight years of college; my graduate students take at least three or four, and often more. One even has a Master's degree in statistics to go along with her MS in ecology. More and more, our field work is only as good as the model being tested, and the test only as good as the calculations provided.Of course, doing field work requires a lot of skill, though usually of the "natural history" category that involves details about birds, plants, and so forth. Doing modeling and developing statistical methods obviously requires a high comfort level with conceptual thinking and mathematics. Few ornithologists are experts in both areas; field people are always trying to figure out what is currently the best way to measure their area of specialty, while modelers are trying to provide methods for the analytical questions posed by the field people. The goal of both groups is to develop the best science possible, with the appropriate scientific models tested with the best quantitative techniques.All these areas within ornithological research change over time, so it is difficult for field people to stay current with the latest models and for modelers to ensure that field people are providing the best data possible and analyzing it properly. Ornithological Monograph No. 59 addresses this problem by serving as a bridge between field biologists and modelers. It provides a state-of-the-art review by a set of experts of the models they consider most relevant to...

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