In the discussion section they identify areas of uncertainty and caveats. I counted 7 of these. How significant are these to the validity of the study?

Thanks in advance.

Scott

Scott,  Its worse than that!....  I spent a day studying and have traded some emails with one of the authors.  First of  some of the numbers are severly distorted.  One author explained to me what they were trying to say,  But it was worded so poorly I don't agree tha was the goal of the author. I suspect the wording was intentionally misleading.

Whats even more important is that this is a Paper,  about a MATHMATICAL THEORITC MODEL that they want to use to "plan the future"  Like somehow a few data points shows us how to predict bee populations nation wide.  The data points are simple snapshots,  with no reference to time.

What was done to "prove the math"  was to trap bees in a few tiny locations.   A quick snapshot.  The trapping was IMO not acceptable.  If you study wild pollinators at all you know that they are highly variable in counts such as bumbles are rare in spring but the population raises quickly in mid summer,  same with paperwasp and yellow jackets and about every other bee.


IMO  this is an attempt to cash in on "global warming math"  where some huge complicated  math model can try to predict things and we use what ever selected points  we want to confirm the math.

In fairness the math work was impressive!  Unfortunately the basis and fact checking are outright scarry.


Charles

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