Search for: All records

Abstract The world is currently facing a biodiversity crisis and for many species, this is exacerbated by historic exploitation. Monitoring programs provide an integral tool to understand changes in abundance and the impact of threats informing conservation actions. However, measures of absolute abundance for management can be misleading, particularly when there is a biased sex ratio. Here we recommend focusing on the rate‐limiting cohort for management actions using the case of North Atlantic right whales. The North Atlantic right whale has a male‐biased sex ratio, with reproductively active females making up less than a fifth of the species. We highlight the importance of understanding and incorporating reproductive potential into management actions to provide species with the best chance of recovery. 

Abstract The Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2) and Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) are designed to measure ethical reasoning of general (DIT-2) and engineering-student (EERI) populations. These tools—and the DIT-2 especially—have gained wide usage for assessing the ethical reasoning of undergraduate students. This paper reports on a research study in which the ethical reasoning of first-year undergraduate engineering students at multiple universities was assessed with both of these tools. In addition to these two instruments, students were also asked to create personal concept maps of the phrase “ethical decision-making.” It was hypothesized that students whose instrument scores reflected more postconventional levels of moral development and more sophisticated ethical reasoning skills would likewise have richer, more detailed concept maps of ethical decision-making, reflecting their deeper levels of understanding of this topic and the complex of related concepts. In fact, there was no significant correlation between the instrument scores and concept map scoring, suggesting that the way first-year studentsconceptualizeethical decision making does not predict the way they behave whenperformingscenario-based ethical reasoning (perhaps more situated). This disparity indicates a need to more precisely quantify engineering ethical reasoning and decision making, if we wish to inform assessment outcomes using the results of such quantitative analyses.