Table 3 Categories used to describe quality of information used in FEIS reviews of invasive plants in the eastern United States.
From: Characteristics of Information Available on Fire and Invasive Plants in the Eastern United States
Category | Information type | Description |
|---|---|---|
Observation-based | Direct observations or measurements by a researcher or manager | Direct measurements and observations, even if not compared with a control group. Includes results from experiments, published or unpublished; information recorded in floras; personal communications from managers. |
Experience-based | Information likely based on a history of direct observations | Information from publication that does not identify basis in observations. This information typically came from syntheses, weed guides, and fact sheets that were written by resource managers or field scientists familiar with the species but did not contain in-text citations, so the source of an assertion could not be determined. |
Unverifiable | Synthesis not clearly based on observations | Information given in a literature review or synthesis for which the basis was not clear or not verifiable |
Inference | Assertion based on a collection of information, often found in syntheses and also in introduction and conclusion sections of research papers | |
Unknown | Information from fact sheets or similar publications that contain neither bibliographies nor in-text citations | |
Unsubstantiated claim | Unverifiable statement, typically from literature lacking both in-text citations and bibliography |