ES100/Critique of Scientific Paper Exercise

Practice

Intro

Full disclosure of people and organizations related to the research is nice, but listing every single assistant who worked on the project in the introduction seems like overkill. In addition, I feel like the thesis could be more direct; instead of saying "Herein I report...", perhaps better wording would have been "As a result [of oystercatcher dep. on shorelines], I expected their populations to be significantly adversely affected by the oil spill."

Study area

No real problems, except that the sentence beginning with "In 1990, nest sites..." would be better placed in the methods section.

Methods

It is mentioned that approaches to nests were made in such a way as to prevent attracting predators, but no mention is made of whether they also made attempts to avoid disturbing the oystercatchers themselves. This seems especially challenging given that they want to accurately count both whether there's a pair at the nest and the number of eggs present (since the latter would require disturbance to see how many eggs there were). The different survey periods also gave me pause. Some of the estimates listed in the paragraph "I estimated several components..." feel like they are too hand-wavy (such as 1990 nest productivity). The fact that feeding rates were measured "opportunistically" feels odd as well.