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Concepts for Wildlife Science: Design Application

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Wildlife Study Design

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Environmental Management ((SSEM))

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In this chapter, we turn our attention to the concept of basic study design. We begin by discussing variable classification, focusing on the types of variables: explanatory, disturbing, controlling, and randomized. We then discuss how each of these variable types is integral to wildlife study design. We then detail the necessity of randomization and replication in wildlife study design, and relate these topics to variable selection.

We outline the three major types of designs in decreasing order of rigor (i.e., manipulative experiments, quasi-experiments, and observational studies) with respect to controls, replication, and randomization, which we further elaborate in Chap. 3. We provide a general summary on adaptive management and we briefly touch on survey sampling designs for ecological studies, with a discussion on accounting for detectability, but leave detailed discussion of sampling design until Chap. 4.

We discuss the place of statistical inference in wildlife study design, focusing on parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, and model selection. We do not delve into specific aspects and applications of statistical models (e.g., generalized linear models or correlation analysis) as these are inferential, rather than design techniques. We discuss the relationships between statistical inference and sampling distributions, covering the topics of statistical accuracy, precision, and bias. We provide an outline for evaluating Type I and II errors as well as sample size determination. We end this chapter with a discussion on integrating project goals with study design and those factors influencing the design type used, and conclude with data storage techniques and methods, programs for statistical data analysis, and approaches for presenting results from research studies.

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(2008). Concepts for Wildlife Science: Design Application. In: Wildlife Study Design. Springer Series on Environmental Management. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-75528-1_2

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