“I tawt I taw a puddy tat!": Extinction and uncertain sightings of the Barbary lion
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Mathematical Biology
- Keywords
- data quality, critically endangered, IUCN Red List, sighting record, possibly extinct, sighting uncertainty
- Copyright
- © 2015 Lee et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- (2015) “I tawt I taw a puddy tat!": Extinction and uncertain sightings of the Barbary lion. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1045v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1045v1
Abstract
As species become rare and approach extinction, purported sightings can be controversial, especially when scarce management resources are at stake. We report a Bayesian model where we consider the probability that each individual sighting is valid. Obtaining these probabilities clearly requires a strict framework to ensure that they are as representative as possible. We used a process, which has proven to provide accurate estimates from a group of experts, to obtain probabilities for the validation of 35 sightings of the Barbary lion. We considered the scenario where experts are simply asked whether a sighting was valid, as well as when we asked them to score the sighting based on distinguishablity, observer competence, and verifiability. We find that asking experts to provide scores for these three aspects resulted in each sighting being considered more individually. Additionally, since the heavy reliance on the choice of prior can often be the downfall of Bayesian methods, we use an informed prior which changes with time.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.