The new publication is the culmination of a multi-year project. "This allows us to get species-level estimates for all members of a community, and also a comprehensive understanding of what's going on with the community as a whole." "We're borrowing strength from the species that have the most information or are most common," Zipkin said. To that end, Zipkin and her Quantitative Ecology Lab have introduced a framework based on what are known as "integrated community models." In their paper, the researchers show how they design and implement these models to utilize data from the best-characterized species in a community to assess other members of the group. "We need more rapid and efficient assessments of those species if we want to figure out how to protect and conserve them." "There are so many species where we don't have the data to tell us exactly what's going on," Zipkin said. That means these species lack the data needed to inform their conservation status, which, in turn, helps determine conservation strategies. "We have to think more strategically about how to take advantage of those data to answer the tough questions."Ĭurrently, about one in seven species are classified as data deficient by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "At the same time, we have unprecedented amounts of data and computing power," Zipkin said. She is also the director of MSU's Ecology, Evolution and Behavior program (EEB). "We're losing biodiversity so rapidly that we're no longer in a position to ask what's going on with every species individually," said Zipkin, who is an associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at MSU. Additionally, the computer code behind that methodology is freely available on the group's GitHub page. Now, they're sharing their methods with the wider research and conservation community in the Journal of Animal Ecology. That is, they're taking insights from the data-rich and giving to the data-poor. They're using information from well-quantified animals to reveal insights about less common, harder-to-observe species.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |