Risk assessment in conservation biology

Abstract

Population viability analysis (PVA) has become one of the standard tools of conservation biology. Unfortunately, few examples have entered the refereed literature. Most remain in the "grey" world of internal government reports, where the results of "what-if" scenarios become transformed into the firm basis for policy settings. The problem is that rough guesses of population parameters enter the black box of a modeling package, to emerge as attractive and apparently precise graphs of extinction probability as a function of population size. Somewhere in the process, it is often forgotten that the quantitative predictions cannot be better than the quality of the parameters which went into them.