Bigfoot range and population speculation thread.

[NatFoot]

1 minute ago, Twist said:

You must be from a very large area Trog, lol.   For me a 385 sq miles is a very large area to only have up to 40 Grizzly.  That's a little shy of 250,000 acres of land, thats a pretty decent amount of space to me.   

 

I was thinking the same thing!

 

That doesn't seem like a lot of grizzlies to me!

[scottv]

But in high quality habitat it gets up to 175 bear per 1000 sq km

[scottv]

One would expect bigfoot population densities to be higher in higher quality habitat. So what habitat would that be?

 

[Trogluddite]

23 hours ago, Twist said:

You must be from a very large area Trog, lol.   For me a 385 sq miles is a very large area to only have up to 40 Grizzly.  That's a little shy of 250,000 acres of land, thats a pretty decent amount of space to me.   

 

But its only 20 miles by 20 miles, right?  Or is it 385 by 385?  I'm not comparing it to my back yard, but if you have 40 big bears in an area 20 miles by 20 miles, that does seem (to me) to be a lot of bears in a little space (smaller than Cambria County, PA, which is not that big of a place).

 

The reason why that seems significant (again, maybe just to me) is that also means that those 40 bears are eating up the resources in that relatively small space.  If an area 20 miles by 20 miles can support 40 bears all milling about, than one would think that an area of approximately equal size could support the occasional Bigfoot or Bigfoot family group of 3-4 animals.   

[Twist]

It would be 385 miles x 385 miles.

[scottv]

385 square miles would be 19.62 miles by 19.62 miles. Metric is so much easier.

Edited January 12, 2018 by scottv
make an addition

[Twist]

That is because, we are not talking about the square root of 385 miles.  We are talking about an area of space equal to a square with each side being 385 miles.  

[scottv]

If hear "385 square miles" then that's how I think of it. the square root of 385. Is that the wrong way to think of it? Can we get a judgement call from some one else LOL.

[gigantor]

1 hour ago, Twist said:

It would be 385 miles x 385 miles.

 

Incorrect.  Square miles or yards or feet refer to the result of Length x Width.

 

43 minutes ago, scottv said:

385 square miles would be 19.62 miles by 19.62 miles. Metric is so much easier.

 

Correct.

[Twist]

Well then, clearly I stand corrected.  My apologies.  

 

Edit: I would also then agree, I'm surprised by the amount of Grizzly in a 20 x 20.  

Edited January 12, 2018 by Twist

[scottv]

That's a relief. I was worried all my reports had been wrong for the last 20 years.

 

So even poorer quality habitat supports quite a few bears.

 

 

[NatFoot]

28 minutes ago, scottv said:

That's a relief. I was worried all my reports had been wrong for the last 20 years.

 

So even poorer quality habitat supports quite a few bears.

 

 

Wow. Glad we got the right info. I too thought that was far too few bears. If grizzlies exist in that type of area, I don't even want to know how many black bears frequent my area (with a lot of mountain lions too).

[wiiawiwb]

On 1/9/2018 at 8:03 PM, Explorer said:

See link below for an interesting paper published back in 2009 in the Journal of Biogeography titled "Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modeling". 

Just ran into it recently, and while the paper was supposedly done tongue in cheek (because BF does not exist in Biology and because the database was not scientifically collected), the analytics were done as if the BFRO database was suitable.

The authors state that the point of the paper was to show how a very sensible-looking well-performing Ecological Niche Model can be constructed from questionable observational data.

 

Given all those caveats, some of the interesting conclusions from that Ecological Niche model (ENM) of BF were:

1. BF should be broadly distributed in western North America, with a range comprising western NA mountain ranges such as the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Cascades, the Blue Mountains, the southern Selkirk Mountains, and the Coastal Range of the Pacific Northwest.
2. Precipitation of the coldest quarter was the bio-climatic variable that contributed most to the ENM, followed by temperature annual range, mean temperature of the wettest quarter, and means temperature of the driest quarter.
3. The predicted distribution of Sasquatch appears similar to that which might be expected for other large mammals of western North American, including the American black bear.......The two species do not demonstrate significant niche differentiation with respect to the selected bio-climatic variables.  Although it is possible that Sasquatch and U. americanus share such remarkable similar bio-climatic requirements, we nonetheless suspect that many Bigfoot sightings are, in fact, of black bear.

I do not find it surprising that scientists looking at the available BFRO database find that sighting locations coincide with black bear habitat and then suggest that many of these BF reports are misidentification of black bear.

It is the easy and non-controversial answer when crunching numbers from a database that is de-linked from the human stories and details that would have rejected the black bear.

I agree with the authors that garbage in equals garbage out, and that ensuring the quality of the database is key before doing any analytics.

Is the BFRO database 100% garbage?  Probably not, but it does not meet the scientific standards required for these ecoological niche models.

Nonetheless, we can use available databases with care and apply quality filters and then ask questions and looks for patterns.

 

A link to the paper and access to the PDF file is below.

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02152.x/full

 

 

Garbage-in, garbage-out.The only rubbish is your postulation. Anyone who has spent a modicum of time in the woods would never misidentify a black bear for a sasquatch. It's possible a slender-fingered, digital warrior from Manhattan, Chicago, or some other big city, could misidentify because they've never seen a living creature outside of the rats ransacking their coop. 

 

There isn't one chance in a trillion I could make that misidentification.  Would you?

[MIB]

^^^^ I would be far more likely to mistake a sasquatch for a bear than the other way around.   I never assume sasquatch, I assume bear and have to assess the evidence to eliminate bear before moving on to look at the possibility of sasquatch.

 

MIB

[Explorer]

54 minutes ago, wiiawiwb said:

 

Garbage-in, garbage-out.The only rubbish is your postulation. Anyone who has spent a modicum of time in the woods would never misidentify a black bear for a sasquatch. It's possible a slender-fingered, digital warrior from Manhattan, Chicago, or some other big city, could misidentify because they've never seen a living creature outside of the rats ransacking their coop. 

 

There isn't one chance in a trillion I could make that misidentification.  Would you?

 

wiiawiwb, you must be referring to the authors of the paper and not to me, since I disagreed with their suggestion that black bears were misidentified as BF per my comment below.

 

"It is the easy and non-controversial answer when crunching numbers from a database that is de-linked from the human stories and details that would have rejected the black bear."

 

Nonetheless, GIGO is true in all database analysis regardless on whether the database include true BF reports because we want to ensure quality and reliability of the data.