Ray Hilborn is Professor in the School of Fisheries, University of Washington and the coauthor, with Carl Walters,
of Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment.
Mangel, Marc : University of California-Santa Cruz
Marc Mangel is Professor of Environmental Studies and a Fellow at College Eight at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Decision and Control in
Uncertain Resource Systems and coauthor, with Colin Clark, of Dynamic Modeling in Behavioral Ecology.
Summary
The modern ecologist usually works in both the field and laboratory, uses statistics and computers, and often
works with ecological concepts that are model-based, if not model-driven. How do we make the field and laboratory
coherent? How do we link models and data? How do we use statistics to help experimentation? How do we integrate
modeling and statistics? How do we confront multiple hypotheses with data and assign degrees of belief to different
hypotheses? How do we deal with time series (in which data are linked from one measurement to the next) or put
multiple sources of data into one inferential framework? These are the kinds of questions asked and answered by
The Ecological Detective.
Ray Hilborn and Marc Mangel investigate ecological data much as a detective would investigate a crime scene
by trying different hypotheses until a coherent picture emerges. The book is not a set of pat statistical procedures
but rather an approach. The Ecological Detective makes liberal use of computer programming for the generation of
hypotheses, exploration of data, and the comparison of different models. The authors' attitude is one of exploration,
both statistical and graphical. The background required is minimal, so that students with an undergraduate course
in statistics and ecology can profitably add this work to their tool-kit for solving ecological problems.
Table of Contents
Preface : Beyond the Null Hypothesis
An Ecological Scenario and the Tools of the Ecological Detective
Alternative Views of the Scientific Method and of Modeling
Probability and Probability Models : Know Your Data
Incidental Catch in Fisheries : Seabirds in the New Zealand Squid Trawl Fishery
The Confrontation : Sum of Squares
The Evolutionary Ecology of Insect Oviposition Behavior
The Confrontation : Likelihood and Maximum Likelihood
Conservation Biology of Wildebeest in the Serengeti
The Confrontation : Bayesian Goodness of Fit
Management of Hake Fisheries in Namibia Motivation
The Confrontation : Understanding How the Best Fit Is Found
Appendix "The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses"
References
Index
