Study Suggests Global Warming Bad News for Bigfoot
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Whatever you want to call the legendary North American biped, it is likely the elusive beast will lose a portion of its existing habitat in the coastal and lowland regions of the northwestern United States as the climate warms. The good news? Bigfoot will be gaining a bunch of new land in the Rockies and up into Canada.
In a paper recently published in the Journal of Biogeography, biologist Jeff Lozier of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues argue that a potential source of error in publicly available data employed in a commonly-used statistical modeling technique to predict the “ecological niche” of species may affect the accuracy of ecological niche models.
Using a database of sightings and footprints for Bigfoot in western North America, the researchers suggest that convincing distributions of an animals range can be generated from questionable data. By comparing the distribution of Bigfoot to that of a black bear, Lozier et al. “suggest that many sightings of this cryptozoid may be cases of mistaken identity.”
In other words, it’s not Bigfoot that is really the focus of the research by Lozier and his team, but rather the methodology used and the assumptions drawn from incomplete data.
