Background
Information Page
Amenda to DecAID Papers
Since the preparation of several papers on the DecAID
Advisor, some components have changed. This list of ammenda provides
edits and changes you should know about before you use these papers.
Changes in terminology
- It's an "Advisor," not a "Model" -- Some of the earlier papers of ours referred to the DecAID Advisor as a "model." We have been since trying to use the term "advisor" or "statistical summary" instead of model. The term "model" seemed to be misleading. The DecAID Advisor is not a simulation model, and it does not project or predict snag or down wood sizes or amounts. It is a statistical summary of available research data. We urge users to refer to it as the "DecAID Advisor" and not model.
Changes in statistical approach
- Tolerance intervals, not confidence intervals -- One of the earlier papers describing the wildlife component of the DecAID Advisor (the Marcot et al. 2002 paper "The DecAID advisory model: wildlife component" as published in the US Forest Service's proceedings of the Dead Wood Symposium) described the use of confidence intervals in the cumulative species curves. This had since been changed to the more appropriate use of tolerance intervals. This change was footnoted in the paper mentioned here, but it may escape notice. Please notice! The current statistical approach used in the DecAID Advisor -- describing tolerance intervals -- is described in "The Statistical Basis for DecAID."
Changes in methodology
- Other changes & refinements -- Other changes and refinements in methdology in analysis of the inventory plot data and the wildlife data, as varying from the earlier papers presented in the Dead Wood Symposium, are more correctly and fully described in the DecAID Repository link to data methods.