Statistical Methods Helping and Hindering Environmental Science and Management

Environmental scientists face the reality that many of their journals' editors and referees routinely insist that results be accompanied by statements of statistical significance, obtained from two-sided tests of point-null hypotheses. Many in these three groups of people appear only vaguely aw...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of agricultural, biological, and environmental statistics biological, and environmental statistics, 2002-09, Vol.7 (3), p.300-305
Main Author: McBride, Graham B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Applied ecology
Applied statistics
Bayesian analysis
Biological and medical sciences
Confidence interval
Confidence intervals
Conservation, protection and management of environment and wildlife
Ecology
Environmental management
Environmental science
Environmental sciences
environmental statistics
Fisheries management
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
General aspects. Techniques
Marine ecology
Methods and techniques (sampling, tagging, trapping, modelling...)
Null hypothesis
P values
Papers from a Conference Session on Diversity in Statistics in Agriculture, Biology, and Environmental Statistics
Public health
Q1
Statistical methods
Statistical significance
Statistics
Sterility
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Summary:Environmental scientists face the reality that many of their journals' editors and referees routinely insist that results be accompanied by statements of statistical significance, obtained from two-sided tests of point-null hypotheses. Many in these three groups of people appear only vaguely aware of the arbitrariness often invoked by this procedure and of the information sterility in a single p-value. The interpretation to be made of the failure of a test to attain such significance is not clear. For such reasons, some colleagues (and senior statisticians) have called current usage of the procedures into serious question. Some reasons for this dislocation and some of the more dramatic consequences for environmental science and management are presented. Interval and Bayesian approaches can offer remedies.
ISSN:1085-7117
1537-2693
DOI:10.1198/108571102258