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Published online 7 July 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.641

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Bigfoot study highlights habitat modelling flaws

Accurate prediction of climate change's effects is as elusive as the fabled apeman.

John Whitfield

Climate change, it turns out, is going to be a mixed blessing for the sasquatch. The legendary American apeman will lose some of its existing habitat in the coastal and lowland regions of the northwestern United States, but gain a lot of new land in the Rocky Mountains and Canada.

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  • Just to clarify, my coauthors and I are not against the niche modeling technology, nor the approach to distribution modeling in general. We have been/are using these models in much of our own research. In many cases they appear to work excellently and accurately. We have simply observed a few less than careful implementations of the approach, and decided it was worth a short paper to highlight one potential area of fuzziness that should in most cases be readily correctable (out of a number of other potential areas of fuzziness that may be more or less correctable). In addition, we do not take an explicit stance on the existence of bigfoot. We merely made use of a publicly available data set that had questionable records (due to lack of physical specimens) to illustrate our point. In our paper we simply note that the black bear results do suggest a parsimonious explanation for many sightings for those inclined to be skeptical of the creature's existence. Jeff

    • 07 Jul, 2009
    • Posted by: Jeff Lozier