Hugh Bollinger / Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Biogeography as CSI 'tool kit'

Biogeography is the foundation of modern evolutionary science. When Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace conducted their original 19th Century investigations of plant and animal diversity-- becoming the basis of evolution --they were actually studying the influence of biogeography on the occurrence and distribution of every living thing on Earth. Students learn this starting in high school biology class and the same principals follow into any advanced university research in the biological sciences. However, who would have ever believed that some of the analytical tools of biogeography would be used in crime detection-- but that has just happened. The findings of research at UCLA just appeared in ScienceInsider. In a case study worthy of a script for Crime Scene Investigator, students of biogeography at UCLA uncovered the potential hide-out of Osama ben Laden 2 years before it became known to the CIA and heroic Navy Seals. Their probability of confidence in his possible location was nearly 90 percent for a mapped zone of Pakistan where he was eventually apprehended in the town of Abbottabad. [caption id="attachment_3903" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Osama ben Laden hide-out predicted by UCLA students source: MIT International Review"]

[/caption] The undergraduate UCLA geographers, under the guidance of professor Thomas Gillespie and his colleague, John Agnew, authored a 2009 paper predicting the terrorist’s whereabouts. The class case study used an analytical technique of island biogeography-- the minimum area hypothesis --that predicts the likelihood of a species existing in a given sized landscape. The theory predicts the number of species that a space could ecologically support and maintain. Islands proved the ideal location where the minimum area hypothesis could bet tested-- and proven to be highly correct --in the 1970's. According to UCLA's Gillespie: “The theory was basically that if you’re going to try and survive, you’re going to a region with a low extinction rate: a large town. We hypothesized ben Laden wouldn’t be in a small town where people could report on him.” He continued to say that "it’s not my thing to do this type of [terrorism] stuff, but the same theories we use to study endangered birds can be used to do this.” The students and their professors used fantastic deductive reasoning to make their location prediction correlations from a science poorly known to most folks. Perhaps the CIA and Navy Seals may want to pick up a biogeography textbook and learn to use the evolutionary predictive models to locate other "bad guys". They may find another useful tool for their criminal detection "tool kit". WHB

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Tags: biogeography CIA crime scenes detection evolution Navy Seals Osama ben Laden probability Science Insider UCLA

Biogeography as CSI 'tool kit'

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