The team's work recently led FWS to revise the panther-related provisions in its Multi-Species Recovery Plan.
The plan, which has been in development since 1995, is a comprehensive strategy meant to help restore and maintain South Florida's ecosystem. A draft of the plan is now complete and should be available for public review in December.
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FWS admitted it did not move quickly enough to correct some scientific information about the panther. But the agency believes it played an important role in identifying these concerns and supporting the investigation.
"The [FWS] used panther information that had been scientifically peer reviewed," FWS Deputy Directory Marshall Jones said in a March written statement.
"But we and others engaged in panther science and conservation identified significant limitations in its methodology and conclusions. However we should have moved more quickly … an oversight that we regret and are working to correct."
"Take It as Gospel"
Going back and reviewing decades' worth of research is not a common practice, Vaughan said.
"But the data that we found flaws with had gotten into peer-reviewed, published literature," he said. "And once it's in peer reviewed literature like this, people take it as gospel."
Paul Beier, another reviewer and a professor of conservation biology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, said the two most fundamentally flawed papers appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology.
Other researchers subsequently cited those papers in their published studies, he said, creating a snowball effect.
The most serious error found was the selective data use in an influential paper on panther habitat.
Beier said the authors of that paper disregarded some 40 percent of the information they had collected on the movement of radio-collared panthers but didn't acknowledge doing so.
Beier—who serves on the board of governors for Conservation Biology—says he doesn't fully blame the journal for the errors.
"Some of these mistakes were deeply buried," he said. "They were not easy to detect."
To prevent future problems in the scientific review process, Beier would like to see the reviewer's identity—which is normally kept anonymous—included on published papers.
"This encourages you to do a very thorough job, because you know now if this paper is accepted, your name is down there," he said. "This would be a major shift in the way peer review is currently done."
Conservation Biology hasn't changed its anonymous peer-review policy, Beier said. But he plans on speaking to the editorial staff soon about making such an amendment.
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