well, you can make word games out of simple concepts if you wish to. Whenever most sane people refer to a species as being native in a place, they mean it was not taken there by human agency, but either evolved there or migrated there prior to human record keeping. Pretty simple. The other constructs you mention complicate matters, yes, but they do not define the concept of a species being native to a locality. The multiple maps of native range for ponderosa pine may be based on different data sets, or they may be based on different definitions of the species. Those matters do not alter what is meant by a species being native in a location, they just illustrate that we don't always have all the information, or that sometimes we disagree on the data.
mcneely ---- Matt Chew <anek...@gmail.com> wrote: > Jason Persichetti's contention, "we all know what is meant by the idiom" is > precisely false. > > I routinely show audiences eight different maps purporting to represent the > native range of _Pinus_ponderosa_, prepared for different purposes by > different authorities. They can't all be correct AND mean the same thing. > > What "native species" denotes actually varies quite a bit, and no wonder, > since it includes three explicit degrees of freedom (specifications of > place, time, and taxon) at least two tacit ones (who counts as a human, and > what counts as human agency) plus an authority claim. > > Authority claims alone entail ad hoc redefinitions of "native"; e.g., USGS > NAS roils the waters by calling _Micropterus_salmoides_ a "native > transplant" in the United States outside a particular set of hydrologic > units. That is a political calculation. > > What "native species" connotes also varies, but recently, typically > indicates the idiomist is making or ratifying a judgment that some organism > has a moral claim to persisting in a specified place because no human is > known to have physically moved it – or its forbears. But we relax various > aspects of that as easily as we apply them. > > As is (remarkably) typical of ecology's idioms, we have no calibrated > conception of this supposedly fundamental characteristic. Blaming the > shortcomings of language for our failure to formulate a coherent concept is > a red herring unless our consensus "native" really is an inarticulable > intuition. If it is (and nothing I've read so far suggests otherwise) > there's nothing to calibrate, much less recalibrate, and we're not doing > science. > > Matthew K Chew > Assistant Research Professor > Arizona State University School of Life Sciences > > ASU Center for Biology & Society > PO Box 873301 > Tempe, AZ 85287-3301 USA > Tel 480.965.8422 > Fax 480.965.8330 > mc...@asu.edu or anek...@gmail.com > http://cbs.asu.edu/people/profiles/chew.php > http://asu.academia.edu/MattChew -- David McNeely
