Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Biologists often use statistical approaches in which a null hypothesis of “no difference”
is tested (usually with the hope that it can be rejected), but that is quite different from
expecting uniformity from the natural world. Should we expect individuals in one moun-
tain range to be just like those in another? Should we expect animals to eat the same
foods in summer as in winter, or to gather into similarly sized groups regardless of other
factors? Of course the answers to all these questions are no; the critical questions are not
whether differences exist, but why they exist and how these patterns relate to ecological,
evolutionary, or management issues.
The imperative to lump into discrete boxes that which is inherently continuous (or
even unquantified) can be seen in an attempt—honorable in its intent if flawed in its
execution—to assess the success of three international hunting areas in Gansu Province
(focusing on the argali) from social and economic as well as biological contexts. The
paper in question is noteworthy because it explicitly attempts to eschew subjectivity by
quantifying and scoring each area—which, like in figure skating, ultimately receives a
single, final score—and includes much more detailed methodology than do most Chinese
technical papers.
14
The exercise begins by drawing up a list of reasonable criteria for as-
sessing each area and gathering information on each. In this case, the criteria used were
the argali density, the ease of observation of argali, transportation access, the degree of
threat to argali, the poaching situation, the quality of service, the “hunting situation,”
“management quality,” the use of monetary income, and finally, a category simply called
“overall effectiveness.” Of these, some are theoretically quantifiable directly (e.g., argali
density, hunting success rate), some are quantifiable via surrogates (e.g., transportation
access through distance between an airport and the hunting area, or time required to reach
the latter from the former), and yet others would seem to require heroic assumptions or
logical acrobatics in order to move from the qualitative to the quantitative (e.g., quality
of service, management quality). In the paper, however, all are given scores (in fact, some
categories are further subdivided, resulting in a total of twelve “quantified” criteria),
which are then further lumped into nominal categories that themselves are rescored. These
rescored criteria are given unique numeric weights (e.g., density of hunted species is ac-
corded a weight 3 times that of convenience of access, which in turn is 20 percent less
important than “quality of management”), which clearly have the potential to drive the
result, but are neither justified nor examined for sensitivity. Finally, the rescored values
are summed, and each hunting area gets a grade. (To lessen any suspense, the winner
was Subei's Hashiha'er hunting area with a score of 86.2, followed closely by Aksai's
Kharteng area with a score of 83.2, and trailed by Subei's Mazongshan area with a score
of 78.7. The losers need not have worried, however; the system also included an overall
system of cutoffs that graded any area scoring above 75 as “fine” [
liang
], so even the
lowest ranked area was concluded to be doing quite well enough.)
An objective analysis of these hunting areas is laudable, and the desire to systematize
it understandable. But the exercise of ascribing a numeric value to something as inchoate
as “degree of threat to the hunting area,” replacing these pseudo-quantitative variables
with nominal ones, only to then requantify these nominal variables (and finally, arbitrarily
weighting and then adding up the whole ball of wax into a single metric), strikes me as
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