Bigfoot's likely haunts 'revealed'

Sasquatch, the mythical "Bigfoot" of western North America, makes its home deep within the fertile imaginations of gullible people. If you insist on looking for one in the real world, though, you should search in the home of the black bear – at least according to a tongue-in-cheek study of the ape-like creature's habitat preferences.

The study has a more serious message too: it's easy to be fooled into believing a plausible-looking habitat analysis, even when the data is totally erroneous.

Conservation biologists often need to predict where rare species are capable of living – for selecting the best site for a national park, for example, or forecasting how badly a species' range will suffer as the climate changes in the future.

The latest technique for making these predictions is so-called ecological niche modelling, in which researchers log the locations of known species sightings, then gather environmental data for those places to define the ecological limits of the species' range.

Jeff Lozier, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was worried that some people may have been too uncritical in applying the technique. "Whenever you have these new, shiny, easy-to-use approaches, there's a temptation to use them even before you know what the kinks are," he says.

[link to www.newscientist.com]