{"id":2177,"date":"2015-09-19T20:44:02","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T01:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=2177"},"modified":"2015-09-19T20:44:02","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T01:44:02","slug":"science-in-chinese-whispers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2015\/09\/19\/science-in-chinese-whispers\/","title":{"rendered":"Science in Chinese Whispers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Think invasive exotics are responsible for the extinction of local species?\u00a0 Think again, reports<\/a> Fred Pearce in NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> (5 September 2015, paywall):<\/p>\n

The UK government\u2019s Non-native Species Secretariat (NNSS) declares that invasive species have \u201ccontributed to 40 per cent of the animal extinctions that have occurred in the last 400 years<\/a>\u201c. Its source is the Global Biodiversity Outlook 2<\/a> report, published in 2006 by the secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).<\/p>\n

They, in turn, say the stat came from a 2005 paper<\/a> by Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, who was in turn drawing on a 1998 paper<\/a> by David Wilcove, now at Princeton University.<\/p>\n

As is clear from the paper\u2019s title, \u201cQuantifying threats to imperiled species in the US\u201d, Wilcove was not talking about actual extinctions but an extinction threat, and in the context of the US (in fact, his data largely related to Hawaii). Wilcove told me his paper was being misused. Although informed of this, the NNSS has kept the claim on its website. …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Uh oh.\u00a0 Eventually we reach this juicy detail:<\/p>\n

The report cites a 2005 paper<\/a> in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution<\/i>, by Miguel Clavero and Emili Garcia-Berthou of the University of Girona, Spain. But that turns out to be just four paragraphs long.<\/p>\n

It reports, but gives no details of, an analysis of a quarter of the 680 extinct species in an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) database. The authors told me they had not kept the details of their analysis, nor notes on which species they had included.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ya gotta be kidding me.\u00a0 They sound as bad as … myself.\u00a0 And that’s bad.\u00a0 The reason for this dubious paper?<\/p>\n

This work was a riposte to a rather longer paper<\/a> by Jessica Gurevitch and Dianna Padilla of Stony Brook University in New York, who looked at the same IUCN database and concluded that just 2 per cent of all extinctions had alien species listed as a cause.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Especially for a rebuttal, failing to keep your notes, or the details of the analysis, is inexcusable – thus, Fred’s turn of phrase, “Chinese Whispers”.\u00a0 And it turns out many citations and conclusions come to rest on this report.\u00a0 While no one’s denying there must be concerns about invasive species – whether we’re talking the zebra mussels in Minnesota’s lakes<\/a> or the rather more exotic pythons in the Everglades of Florida<\/a> – understanding the true numbers is key to the proper allocation of resources towards the problem, as the magnitude of the problem is unquestionably the key.\u00a0 In fact, here’s a chilling example of a failure to defend against an invasive species properly:<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n(Image courtesy Imgur<\/a><\/em><\/strong>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Think invasive exotics are responsible for the extinction of local species?\u00a0 Think again, reports Fred Pearce in NewScientist (5 September 2015, paywall): The UK government\u2019s Non-native Species Secretariat (NNSS) declares that invasive species have \u201ccontributed to 40 per cent of the animal extinctions that have occurred in the last 400 \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2177"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2182,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2177\/revisions\/2182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}