The Ecological Detective [Hardcover]

Ray Hilborn (Author), Marc Mangel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 1997 | Series: Monographs in Population Biology (Book 28)

The modern ecologist usually works in both the field and the laboratory, uses computers and statistics, and often works with model-based concepts. This book investigates ecological data much as a detective would investigate a crime scene by trying different hypotheses until a coherent picture emerges. The book makes liberal use of computer programming for the generation of hypotheses, exploration of data and the comparison of different models. The authors' attitude is one of exploration, both statistical and graphical. The background required is minimal, so that students with an undergraduate background in statistics and ecology should be able to make use if this work.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The modern ecologist usually works in both the field and laboratory, uses statistics and computers, and often works with ecological concepts that are modelbased, if not modeldriven. How do we make the field and laboratory coherent? How do we link models and data? How do we use statistics to help experimentation? How do we integrate modeling and statistics? How do we confront multiple hypotheses with data and assign degrees of belief to different hypotheses? How do we deal with time series (in which data are linked from one measurement to the next) or put multiple sources of data into one inferential framework? These are the kinds of questions asked and answered by The Ecological Detective.

Ray Hilborn and Marc Mangel investigate ecological data much as a detective would investigate a crime scene by trying different hypotheses until a coherent picture emerges. The book is not a set of pat statistical procedures but rather an approach. The Ecological Detective makes liberal use of computer programming for the generation of hypotheses, exploration of data, and the comparison of different models. The authors' attitude is one of exploration, both statistical and graphical. The background required is minimal, so that students with an undergraduate course in statistics and ecology can profitably add this work to their toolkit for solving ecological problems. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr (March 3, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691034966
• ISBN-13: 978-0691034966
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,469,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book!, May 24, 2000

By 

napsman "napsman" (East Lansing, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models with Data (Paperback)

The Ecological Detective was an excellent, very readable introduction to the idea of combining data and models. Hilborn and Mangel have made a good case for something other than Popperian hypothetico-deductive methods in ecology, and done so in a way that demystifes the use of ecological models, maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian statistics. Very readable.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful but on occasion abstruse, March 24, 2001

By 

John Anderson (Bar Harbor, ME USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models with Data (Paperback)

Hilborn and Mangel should be congratulated, if only for re-publishing Chamberlain's essay on Multiple Woorking Hypotheses, which should be on every ecologist's "Must Read" list but has till now been all too hard to find. Beyond that however the authors give some fascinating examples of ecological analysis based on real-world data, with clear explanations of the perils & pitfalls that they themselves have had to skirt. I have most of the Princeton Monographs, but find that this one is already more dog-eared than many of the others that have sat on the shelf much longer.

3.0 out of 5 stars Difficult reading for a novice statistican, May 13, 2007

By 

Fish Head (CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models with Data (Paperback)

I found the book to be worth the price but very difficult to read. I am a biologist with only an introductory level education in statistics and I couldn't read between the lines well enough to comprehend many of the points that the author was making. In many instances, the reader was provided with a summary of facts or different opinions, but then no conclusions or recommendations were presented. On the other hand, this book covers many very important topics that are not discussed elsewhere.