IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Yoganand, K. | |
| An Appraisal of Scientific Merit of the Tiger Monitoring Scheme Proposed by Project Tiger Directorate and WII Biologists | |
| Personal Communication | |
Since this scheme is being proposed as an alternative to other methods of monitoring tiger populations, and is being claimed that it will provide answers to most questions concerning tiger conservation, an earnest appraisal of its scientific merit has become necessary. The implementation part of this scheme has attracted much criticism, primarily on the practicality of it, level of standardization that would be feasible, observer variability and the quality of data that could be ensured. If the data input is reliable, the results could be relied upon, or, if it is 'garbage-in', then it is probably 'garbage-out'. No amount of desktop modelling can compensate for that. It is open to debate and one could only speculate. Therefore, this appraisal does not go deep into the implementation part of the scheme, and is restricted to the scientific merit of the monitoring framework and the methods proposed. My comments on some of the shortcomings and statistical issues in the proposed scheme, and my responses to the criticism of other established methods by the authors (Drs. Y. V. Jhala, Q. Qureshi, and R. Gopal) of the scheme are listed below. |
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