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

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Wildlife By The Numbers

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

11 episodes

1 month ago

Co-hosted by Grant Harris, PhD, along with statisticians David "Randy" Stewart, PhD, and Matthew Butler, PhD, the Wildlife By The Numbers podcast emphasizes the importance of proper statistical approaches in wildlife ecology. Grant, Randy, and Matt also share anecdotes to create awareness about the challenges and rewards of ecological research. The special feature episodes of Wildlife By The Numbers, co-hosted by Cinthia, "The databrarian", highlight data lifecycle topics that support the work of wildlife ecology professionals. https://iris.fws.gov/APPS/ServCat/Reference/Profile/181148

All content for Wildlife By The Numbers is the property of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

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

Wildlife By The Numbers

19 minutes 32 seconds

1 year ago

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

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/