In his recent opinion letter published in Nature, UVic conservation scientist Chris Darimont applauded the provincial government's ban on grizzly bear trophy hunting in BC. He described it as "an end to the co-opting of science to justify questionable policies."
On a related topic, a group of five international conservation scientists, including Darimont as lead author, today published a scholarly opinion paper in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology. Their review of case studies in four countries revealed that wildlife population sizes, trends and associated policies reported by some governments lack supporting evidence.
An era of open access data
"Questionable can be built on unreliable population data that inflate the numbers of large carnivore populations," explains Darimont, a faculty member in UVic's geography department and the science director at Raincoast Conservation Foundation. "An era of open access data and increasingly quantitative wildlife science allows unprecedented opportunity for researchers to look under the hood' of wildlife management. Such independent inspection can reveal the potential for politics to influence policy."
The large carnivore case studies that inspired the researchers to coin the term "political populations" are: wolves in the US and Sweden; grizzly bears in Romania and Canada (specifically, BC).
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