Random Sampling
05/08/24 • 17 min
Hosts Matthew Butler, Grant Harris, and Randy Stewart set the stage for Wildlife by the Numbers emphasizing the importance of proper scientific approaches in wildlife ecology and sharing anecdotes to create awareness about the challenges and rewards of ecological research.
Episode quotes:
"Today, we're gonna talk about an issue that we often confront with biologists, particularly young biologists that are just getting into wildlife work and understanding statistics and science well, conservation science design of of studies, and that is random sampling and the importance of random sampling and why it matters. To help introduce this topic, we'll start with, a simple example, and then we'll get into more wildlife oriented issues. So for the simple example, I have a big garden, and it's large. It's it's an acre in size."
"Okay. So now that we know we need to to sample, so to not count everything but parts of it, and we want those parts to be representative, how do we then get that representative sample? What do what procedure do we have to use to make sure that sample represents the population at large?"
"And so that's why we were talking about we wanna make sure that when we sample, we are doing it in a random way to account for the differences in number of tomatoes on each plant to make sure we have an accurate representation of the true count in that garden."
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.s01ep01
Citation formatter: https://citation.doi.org/
Hosts Matthew Butler, Grant Harris, and Randy Stewart set the stage for Wildlife by the Numbers emphasizing the importance of proper scientific approaches in wildlife ecology and sharing anecdotes to create awareness about the challenges and rewards of ecological research.
Episode quotes:
"Today, we're gonna talk about an issue that we often confront with biologists, particularly young biologists that are just getting into wildlife work and understanding statistics and science well, conservation science design of of studies, and that is random sampling and the importance of random sampling and why it matters. To help introduce this topic, we'll start with, a simple example, and then we'll get into more wildlife oriented issues. So for the simple example, I have a big garden, and it's large. It's it's an acre in size."
"Okay. So now that we know we need to to sample, so to not count everything but parts of it, and we want those parts to be representative, how do we then get that representative sample? What do what procedure do we have to use to make sure that sample represents the population at large?"
"And so that's why we were talking about we wanna make sure that when we sample, we are doing it in a random way to account for the differences in number of tomatoes on each plant to make sure we have an accurate representation of the true count in that garden."
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.s01ep01
Citation formatter: https://citation.doi.org/
Next Episode
Random Sampling Challenges and Examples
Delving into the significance of random sampling, hosts Matt, Grant, and Randy, use real-world examples to illustrate challenges associated with sampling, stressing the importance of random sampling for accurate representations of wildlife populations.
Episode quotes
"...my question for the group is, do you think, they can actually achieve their objectives with a sample size of one, with one transect inside a particular city. Do you think they can achieve that at the city scale?"
" Inside that rectangle, they're placing, camera traps to monitor species richness across that gradient of habitat from the lowlands to the uplands."
"...so to bring this home from where we began (referring back to episode 1), we had a garden with tomatoes in it, and now we have a city with wildlife in it. And so the garden area is is akin to our city area, and our the number of tomatoes in the garden that we wanna know the number of is is a parallel to the wildlife we want to sample in that city."
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.s01ep02
Citation formatter: https://citation.doi.org/
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