Strengths and opportunities in gopher tortoise population modeling: Reply to Loope et al.

We read the letter written by Loope et al. (2024) that evaluated the predictive population model for gopher tortoises from our previous paper (Folt et al., 2022), and, despite criticism raised, we contend that our effort remains a valuable contribution. In our previous paper, we performed an unprecedented and exhaustive review of gopher tortoise population demography, which synthesized a large volume of literature about the current state of knowledge on gopher tortoise population dynamics and factors that influence demographic rates, including anthropogenic threats (Folt et al., 2022). We then built a predictive population model that examined the relative influence of multiple anthropogenic stressors on tortoise populations into the future, while accounting for important geographic variation (Folt et al., 2022).