The importance of representative samples and why it matters in wildlife work.

10/04/24 • 19 min

In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Matt, Grant, and Randy talk about the importance of representative samples and why it matters in wildlife work.

Episode Quotes:

"...layman's terms, bias is when you're reporting something that's really not valid because either your technique or your approach has provided answers that are no longer representative."

"Some good examples of the availability is oftentimes related to the animal's activity patterns. And so during the time of the survey, for instance, let's say for snakes and mussels, they could actually just be simply underground, especially for some of those snakes. So they're not available to be detected at that time of the survey."

"The reason we have to be attentive to both this idea of detection and availability is if we're not paying attention to it, we will get biased answers because we're not accounting for those prairie dogs that are in their burrows, and we're not accounting for these animals that are far away that we may not that are available that we just can't detect. And so we have to we have to figure so in wildlife surveys, we have to use techniques that will account for those factors and eliminate or minimize the chance that they'll cause bias in your final results."

"What is a true zero versus what is a what is a false zero? And the way detection works is if you go to a site and you didn't observe that the individual was present at the time of the survey, is it due to the fact that it wasn't simply present, or was it some other reason why you were not able to observe it specifically?"

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Matt, Grant, and Randy talk about the importance of representative samples and why it matters in wildlife work.

Episode Quotes:

"...layman's terms, bias is when you're reporting something that's really not valid because either your technique or your approach has provided answers that are no longer representative."

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

Previous Episode

Examples for Precision Estimates

In this episode, Matt, Randy, and Grant dive into a discussion of more in-depth real world examples related to precision estimates.

Episode Quotes

"...when you're talking about sample size, you're often doing this game of optimization where I'm trying to optimize precision with costs because I may need a precision of ten percent, but if it's gonna cost me a million dollars to get it, then we need to rethink our goals and what what we're doing because that's probably not achievable. And so it's this...back and forth between costs and efficiencies. And how much precision do we need to be able to answer the questions at hand."

"...we had a wealth of information that fed into various analyses, whether it was published or not published, that allowed us to really find a concrete way of moving that program forward. So that when we start seeing declines, let's say of a certain species in one of the ponds, we can start now over time being able to understand why that population is declining. What are the mechanisms behind it?"

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep05

DOI Citation Formatter: https://citation.doi.org/

Next Episode

Structure of a peer-review paper Part 1

In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Matt and Grant, a duo who has been co-authoring papers together for over a decade, give a candid discussion on publication to share your work. They have a lively discussion of how they write a scientific paper, and dive into the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections of a paper sharing how their writing was influenced by their professors as well. They have saved the abstract, editing, proofing, and deciding which journal to submit to for another episode.

Quotes from this episode...

"Writing is the backbone of what scientists do, and it's extremely important to write up what you're doing and present that in a format that has been reviewed by other scientists. At the most basic level, folks can understand that you wanna share your knowledge. But there's a number of reasons why you want to write a scientific paper, have that go through a a rigorous peer review, and then publish it. One of them is, as I just said, you wanna share the information so others can learn from it and others can build off it and improve and contribute to the field of wildlife biology or ecology or whatever science your your discipline you're working with and advance that field, help folks understand the issue that you're working on because it may it may spur other questions that they have or help them with the work that they're doing. Scientific writing also in that peer review process also brings credibility to your work."

"Why in the world do we use such a format? Why is it not like if I do a presentation at a scientific meeting, I may do some methods and results to discuss that, and then start over again. And do that multiple times even for one smaller type that might be a chapter in a thesis or dissertation. I'm not gonna roll all my results together and talk through all those individual results and then discuss all of them afterwards, it just doesn't flow very well. So why in the world do we do it that way?"

"What Stuart has impressed upon me is in your introduction, you have the first three hundred words is what's gonna grab your reader. And in that first three hundred words, you should speak to what the issue is that you're addressing, why it's important, why it matters, and then how you resolve it. So the first three hundred words, what's the issue? Why does it matter? And then how do you address it? And that's how he taught me to write it."

Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/