The Ecological Detective

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.

While the first chapter on the tools of the "ecological detective" and the second chapter on modeling and philosophies of science are good, the rest of the book is just OK. Many of the topics in the book you can find elsewhere (e.g., the different types of probability models in Chapter 3). There is a mistake in the AIC formula on page 159. Therefore, it is a good synopsis of ecological "tools," and the philosophy of multiple working hypotheses, but it really doesn't present anything groundbreaking.

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.

This is a great book. Read it and keep it.

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.