... Owl?¹

I'll preach here again about the difference between the scientific question and the value question. If you think about things the way I do, this question is a scientfic question. It requires only experimentally collected data and ecological/genetic theory to determine what the requirements are for long-term persistence of the species. The question of whether to meet those requirements is a values question. It involves weighing the desire to prevent extinction of the northern Spotted Owl against the desire to provide an economic livelihood who depend on lumber extraction from old-growth forests for the livelihood and well-being (among other tradeoffs).

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... subspecies.²

The control region of animal mitochondrial DNA is usually the most rapidly evolving part of the molecule, and is often more useful for analysis of diversity within species than are other parts of the molecule.

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... population.³

A Californian haplotype was collected from the southernmost population of northern Spotted Owls sampled. The nine other haplotypes found in this population were northern haplotypes.

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... endangered.⁴

Don't forget our discussion about whether or not ESUs are the appropriate criterion for determining whether populations are worthy of protection. I'm assuming, and I think it's reasonable to make this assumption, that everyone agrees that ESUs are worthy of concern. The debate about the relationship between ESUs and endangered species protection concerns whether populations segments that are not ESUs deserve some protection, too, and whether all ESUs are equally worthy of protection.

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... model:⁵

This section is based on Lande [4].

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... eigenvalue⁶

Recall that the leading eigenvalue gives (asymptotically) the geometric growth rate of the population.

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... decline.⁷

This is, or should be, an elementary statistical point. In classical statistics, we often test a null hypothesis. When we do and we fail to reject the null hypothesis, we should not conclude that the null hypothesis is true. We should conclude only that the evidence we have is not sufficient to reject it, which is not the same thing.

To see why, consider a simple example: Suppose I assert that the average height of human beings is 2 meters. Now let's suppose we pick a couple of people at random from this room and see how tall they are. I don't think anyone would be surprised if one of those picked was about 1.8 meters (5 feet, 11 inches) and the other was about 1.6 meters (5 feet, 3 inches) tall. Would that be enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the average height in humans is 2 meters? No. The 95% confidence interval on the mean is 0.43-2.97 meters.

We may fail to reject a null hypothesis that is ``obviously'' false simply because we didn't collect enough data.

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... above,⁸

From Burnham et al. [2]. See [6] for a summary.

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... 0.84.⁹

Recall that Lande used 0.94 in his 1988 calculations.

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... metapopulation.¹⁰

metapopulation - A set of partially interacting populations connected by (1) exchange of individuals among existing populations, (2) extinction of existing populations, and (3) founding/re-colonization of populations.

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