I got a number! Now what?

Are treatment effects and statistical significance the end of the story? Extrapolating measurements to broader temporal and spatial quantification is a frequent goal of ecological research, but this requires a model. Everyone has a conceptual model (or six) of their system. Informal extensions of conceptual models are frequently used to address broader implications, but where do these informal extensions fail? Mathematicians are extremely deliberate about stating assumptions, and some of these strategies are useful in developing ecological models. Borrowing from these mathematical tools, this talk will walk through conceptual model to mathematical model to model-data integration in five minutes.