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Estimated reading time: 1 minutes
There are many plant and animal species considered to be threatened, endangered, or of special concern to regulators and the public. Correctly estimating population sizes, relationship to habitats, and potential effects of anthropomorphic activities is crucial to making informed policy and regulatory decisions.
Environmental conditions affecting species populations are the limiting factors. Quantifying limiting factors is fundamental to developing policies and practices that are most likely to create the desired future conditions for the species and its habitats. When limiting factor analyses are incomplete or otherwise flawed policies and regulations are ineffective and result in environmental and economic harm. One reason for ineffective limiting factors analysis is treating biological data the same as more familiar types of continuous data.
The differences between biological data and business, financial, or economic data are important. Biological data require different statistical models and paradigms than those taught in introductory statistics courses.
This work was originally published on the Applied Ecosystem Services, LLC web site at https://www.appl-ecosys.com/blog/factors-limiting-species-populstions-1/
It is offered under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. In short, you may copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format as long as you credit Dr. Richard Shepard as the author. You may not use the material for commercial purposes, and you may not distribute modified versions.
