INSRUCTIONS FOR THE DISCUSSION OF ROMESBURG

One approach to reading the scientific literature: As professionals in wildlife and conservation biology it is important that you develop the habit of regularly reading the scientific literature. Such reading is the principal means of staying current in your chosen profession. Recognizing that it is impossible to read all (or even a large proportion) of the huge literature generated each year, it is essential that you select one to a few journals that are of greatest importance to your work.

I subscribe to a number of journals and each month I check the table of contents of these journals. Of the total papers published in these journals, I generally read from 1-5 per journal per month. Of these, I may only read one or two carefully. The others are read less carefully to quickly get the main point made by the authors.

For papers I read carefully (the approach you should take for any literature you read for this course), I read the paper quickly to get the general approach, methods and conclusions. I then reread the paper more critically with the goal of evaluating whether methods used and assumptions made by the authors are adequate to support their main conclusions. This process can be difficult as there may be logical fallacies in the authors’ reasoning or there may be hidden assumptions that are associated with the biology of the system being studied. One way to assess such problems is to ask whether any aspect of a species’ behavior or the sampling protocol, or a combination of the two could have influenced the data in such a way as to biased the authors’ conclusions.

Reading Romesburg: Romesburg is not a typical data paper so some of the suggestions above will not apply. You can evaluate the models used in Romesburg’s analysis of the threshold of security example and the impact that assumptions underlying these models might have on suggested approaches to testing the hypothesis. Most importantly, you should evaluate for yourself the logic underlying Romesburg’s arguments about needed changes in our approach to understanding wildlife populations.

To do: Come to class with one question about the paper and a statement of Romesburg’s most important conclusion.