Response to Kriticos et al.

Abstract

Citation: Elith J, Burgman MA (2014) Response to Kriticos et al. (2014) discuss a recent paper of ours (Elith et al. 2013). While we agree with several of the points they raise, in this brief response we focus on clarifying a subset of issues around improving pest risk modelling. We do so because several of their suggestions are based on misunderstandings of technical details and will not, as they hope, lead to improved modelling practice. Elith et al. (2013) used the Puccinia psidii complex as a case study to explore the impact of taxonomic uncertainty on modelled predictions. The work was clear in stating that it did not intend to provide definitive predictions and advice for biosecurity managers. This position is clear in the title and in statements in Elith et al. (2013) such as 'The purpose of this study is to explore the implications of taxonomic uncertainty for the management of a new invasive pathogen. We use the Australian incursion of myrtle/ guava rust as an example, not to argue which taxonomic interpretation, data set or model is correct, but to highlight the impact of taxonomic belief on modelled predictions.' We discussed how to make risk weighted decisions that accommodate this kind of uncertainty. We created 5 datasets of species records that were either the full set of available presence records for the P. psidii complex ("Pucc94") or subsets of that, each of which accorded with a different taxonomic interpretation.The Kriticos et al. (2014) commentary primarily uses for illustration the Pucc94 dataset (94 records) and the Ured27 dataset -a subset of Pucc94 comprising 10 records of Uredo rangelii (variously viewed as a separate species or a member of the complex) and an additional 17 records from similar environments (see Elith et al. 2013 for details). Elith et al. (2013) emphasised that "we recognise that the basis for Copyright J. Elith, M.A. Burgman. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.NeoBiota 23: 95-99 (2014)