Reconciling expert judgement and habitat suitability ...

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such a an approach may sometimes exclude people with useful knowledge ... Hoa, D.T., Kacha, K., Sysomphone, T., Wallate, S., Hai, C.T.T., Thanh, N. Van &.
Reconciling expert judgement and habitat suitability models as tools for guiding sampling of threatened species Olatz Aizpurua, Lisette Cantú-Salazar, Gilles San Martin, Gilles Biver, Lluís Brotons, Nicolas Titeux Appendix S1. Further explanation about expert selection and qualification The conventional approach to defining experts is by their qualifications, track record, professional standing, and experience. However, Burgman et al. 2011) emphasizes that such a an approach may sometimes exclude people with useful knowledge and lead to biases of expert judgments linked to the social status of the selected experts. For that reason, we decided to identify experts based on the qualifications and experience allowing them to provide us with ‘contributory expertise’ (i.e. fully developed and internalized skills and knowledge, sensu Burgman et al. 2011) on bird ecology and conservation at the national scale. The small population of the country (Luxembourg: 543,000 inhabitants) made it possible to identify easily the people working in this field. They were identified and asked to participate in the study following a snowball sampling method (Ntshotsho et al. 2015; Turvey et al. 2015), where we directly asked them if they knew other people fitting in the study requirements. A total of 9 experts were identified and invited to participate in the study: 7 of them accepted the invitation and 2 of them declined it due to a lack of time. All of them were selected because of their ‘lay’ knowledge (Burgman et al. 2011), obtained with many years (around 15-20 years for each of them) of experience in the field. They have been collecting bird distribution data in the field across the whole country for many years on a volunteer (3 experts) or professional (4 experts) basis. Two of them are particularly known for their personal interest for shrikes. Due to the small size of the country, we assumed that the expertise selected for this study covered the whole distribution of the target species at the national level. References Burgman, M.A., Carr, A., Godden, L., Gregory, R., McBride, M.F., Flander, L. & Maguire, L. (2011) Redefining expertise and improving ecological judgment. Conservation Letters, 4, 81–87. Ntshotsho, P., Prozesky, H.E., Esler, K.J. & Reyers, B. (2015) What drives the use of scientific evidence in decision making? The case of the South African Working for Water program. Biological Conservation, 184, 136–144. Turvey, S.T., Trung, C.T., Quyet, V.D., Nhu, H. Van, Thoai, D. Van, Tuan, V.C.A., Hoa, D.T., Kacha, K., Sysomphone, T., Wallate, S., Hai, C.T.T., Thanh, N. Van & Wilkinson, N.M. (2015) Interview-based sighting histories can inform regional conservation prioritization for highly threatened cryptic species. Journal of Applied Ecology, 52, 422–433.