Twisted tale of the tiger: the case of inappropriate data and deficient science
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Conservation Biology, Ecology, Ethical Issues, Natural Resource Management, Population Biology
- Keywords
- Double sampling, Ethics, Index calibration, Large scale surveys, Tiger status estimation, Use of inappropriate data
- Copyright
- © 2019 Qureshi 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
- 2019. Twisted tale of the tiger: the case of inappropriate data and deficient science. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27349v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27349v2
Abstract
Publications in peer reviewed journals are often looked upon as tenets on which future scientific thought is built. Published information is not always flawless and errors in published research should be expediently reported, preferably by a peer review process. We review a recent publication by Gopalaswamy et al (doi:10.1111/2041-210X.12351) that challenges the use of “double sampling” in large scale animal surveys. Double sampling is often resorted to as an established economical and practical approach for large scale surveys since it calibrates abundance indices against absolute abundance, thereby potentially addressing the statistical shortfalls of indices. Empirical data used by Gopalaswamy et al. to test their theoretical model, relate to tiger sign and tiger abundance referred to as an Index Calibration experiment (IC-Karanth). These data on tiger abundance and signs should be paired in time and space to qualify as a calibration experiment for double sampling, but original data of IC-Karanth show lags of (up to) several years. Further, data points used in the paper do not match the original sources. We show that by use of inappropriate and incorrect data collected through a faulty experimental design, poor parameterization of their theoretical model, and selectively-picked estimates from literature on detection probability, the inferences of this paper are highly questionable. We highlight how the results of Gopalaswamy et al. were further distorted in popular media. If left unaddressed, Gopalaswamy et al. paper could have serious implications on statistical design of large-scale animal surveys by propagating unreliable inferences.
Author Comment
Accepted version of the manuscript for publication in Peer J after peer review.
Supplemental Information
Original data used by Gopalaswamy et al 2015 for their Figure 5, as published in the cited sources
Original data used by Gopalaswamy et al 2015 for their Figure 5, as published in the cited sources.
MS Accepted for Publication
Communication from Peer J
