Post provided by Barbara Anderson

Today is International Women’s Day to mark the occasion I have the privilege of recommending, ‘A practical guide to structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol‘ by Victoria Hemming et al. The IDEA behind the IDEA protocol – ‘Investigate’, ‘Discuss’, ‘Estimate’ and ‘Aggregate’ – is to provide a framework for Structured Expert Elicitation.

As a quantitative ecologist, I sometimes attempt to model species’ abundance and distribution changes in response to environmental change. Often these are species that, for one reason or another, we know a lot about. They may be high profile species of conservation concern, or have some economic or cultural importance. Some are simply model species that many people have studied because they’re easy to study because many people have studied them. Just as often though, we’re missing crucial data on one or more parameters. Frustratingly we don’t always have the time or resources to collect the new ecological or biological data required. Continue reading →