Tag: Science
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Overlooked choices shape research outcomes: what do “researcher degrees of freedom” mean for how science informs policy?
By Jonathan A. Walter, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences Research results can depend not only on the data itself, but on how they are analyzed.1 This is importantly different from how stakeholders with different interests may interpret results differently, perhaps (consciously or subconsciously) motivated by their interest in the outcome. A recent study “Same…
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Seven conservation lessons I learned in government work
By Andrew L. Rypel *this is a repost of a blog originally published in 2020. Before joining the faculty at UC Davis, I spent the previous five years as a research scientist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in Madison, Wisconsin. Apparently this experience is somewhat rare among academics. A peer even once described…
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Science seen from different perspectives
by Jay Lund The awe-inspiring Phil Isenberg used to talk about differences in culture between science and policy as being akin to the two cultures of scholarship discussed by C.P. Snow – science and humanities. It is hard for one mind to deeply appreciate the variety and importance of many ways of thinking, and more…
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Science Happens
By Andrew L. Rypel The famous expression ‘Life Happens!’ has certainly been around awhile. It’s reserved as a sort of colloquialism, describing how someone’s life or life plans are completely upended by circumstances, usually because of seemingly random events. This summer, I’ve been reflecting on how these types of events also seem to occur in…
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New science or just spin: science charade in the Delta
By Karrigan Bork, Andrew L. Rypel, and Peter Moyle Science-based decision making is key to improved conservation management and a legal mandate in the US Endangered Species Act. Thus supporters of federal efforts to increase water exports from the Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water Project (SWP) have claimed that these efforts are based…