martedì 26 dicembre 2017

Misery of ecological thought

A friend of mine published an interesting papers stating that in conservation we are builiding a generation of idots-savants (Battisti 2017 How to make (ineffective conservation projects..  Animal Conservation). I dare say the same occurs with studies of biodiversity. For instance a paper of the holy McGill )2012) states that he was surpising to find an inverse relationships between growth rate and abundace in trees of North America. But this is exactly was is expected from a logisti growth model which is a the base og ALL ecological theory of today  and I am surprised that renowned scientist cannot even interpret the formula of logistic growth dN/dr = rN,(1-N/K). Mc Gill thought thta the grotwh rate is r, while frowth rate is obviously dN/dt and it decreases after reachintg a maximu in logistic growth. In other words, the great ecologists "discovered" densituy-dependence (decrease in growth erate with denisty).






This is the growth rate-density relationship; it is found in every standard manual of ecology (if you care to read them(; this is taken from here  8a site of physicists, alas!). Mc Gill "discovered" the right half of the graph. Also Thuiller et al 2016 (see below) discoevred the right half of the graph since ihey fitted a linear and anot a quadratic model to their data (and of course they also were suprised)


Ah, palying with computers instead of studying ecology is very dangerous for thinking. And I am angry that I need to be so polemic. Thuiller, et al  2014. Does probability of occurrence relate to population dynamics? Ecography 1155-1166 say the same but with less anger.

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