Elliot Gould

PhD Details

Ecological models are used both directly and indirectly to underpin conservation decision-making, thus reproducible and transparently documented models that generate robust results are crucial for successful biodiversity conservation and management. Alarmingly, recent meta-research has revealed that ecology and conservation is at risk of a ‘reproducibility crisis’, suffering from the hallmark conditions demonstrated to foster unreliable and irreproducible results in other scientific disciplines. However, the majority of reproducibility research is focussed on hypothesis testing methods, yet in applied ecological research other scientific methods and modelling frameworks, such as decision-theory, optimisation and cost-effectiveness analysis prevail. The overarching goal of this PhD is to investigate the reproducibility and transparency of models within applied ecology, and to develop and test model-centric research methods that generate reliable results to inform sound biodiversity and conservation decision-making.