Wildlife By The Numbers

In this episode of Wildlife by the Numbers, hosts Matt, Grant, and Randy explore methods for estimating wildlife abundance using both marked and unmarked techniques. They discuss distance sampling, removal sampling, N-mixture models, capture-mark-recapture, and spatial capture-recapture. The conversation emphasizes the importance of robust study design, detection probability, and population closure assumptions in ecological research.Episode Quotes“Marked simply means you have an animal like an ocelot that has spots… so you can identify the same individuals over time based on their coat pattern.”“Distance sampling is a technique in which you take advantage of the fact that things are harder to see or detect at greater distances… and use that to estimate abundance.”“Spatial capture-recapture incorporates where animals were observed and where traps were located… helping produce more precise estimates of abundance and spatial distribution.”Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s02ep01DOI Citation Formatter: https://citation.doi.org/Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

Grant, Matt, and Randy gear up to discuss precision, accuracy, and variability in wildlife studies. They dive into how variability measures data spread, using range, quartiles, standard deviation, variance, and coefficient of variation (CV).Accuracy reflects closeness to the true value, precision shows clustering of estimates. Standard errors, confidence intervals, and Bayesian credibility intervals quantify estimate precision. Required precision depends on study goals, sample size, and application, ensuring reliable, interpretable, and actionable results for wildlife management and conservation.They wrap up with some examples, but the take home message is deciding how precise results need to be hinges on the question and resources.Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep011DOI Citation Formatter: https://citation.doi.org/ Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

Matt, Grant, and Randy finish up the discussion on peer-review publication highlighting their process for selecting journals, getting the submission ready, the review and handling rejections. Randy describes the process as both an author and an associate editor.From this episode:"Randy, what happens after an author submits a paper? How how does that work from a journal standpoint?""Well, it goes through their process, and then the editor or the chief editor distributes it down to the editor in charge of the paper, which then contacts and associates that paper, with the appropriate associate editor. And then at that time, the associate editor is responsible for creating a review team comprised of typically two to three reviewers."Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep09Citation formatter: https://citation.doi.org/Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under an 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 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." Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep07Citation formatter: https://citation.doi.org/Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/

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.s01ep05DOI Citation Formatter: https://citation.doi.org/

Shifting focus to sample size determination, Matt, Grant, and Randy explore the challenges and considerations in choosing appropriate sample sizes for reliable ecological research. They discuss trade-offs, budget constraints, and introduce the concept of power analysis for enhancing the reliability of ecological studies.Quotes from this episode:"In this podcast, we're going to talk about sample size needs. How many samples does a person need to collect to get a representative sample of the population? So it leads us back to this whole representativeness idea. If a person samples too few, then there's a very good chance that person is going to include a disproportionate number of outliers, oddballs or anomalies in the sample.""...in the earlier episode we said, if all the plants have the same number of tomatoes we would just have to sample one of them. That was an invariant population. But we also spoke to that some plants had 100 tomatoes and some had none. And so we have extreme variability.""… (the amount) of uncertainty you're willing to deal with, and how much imprecision you're willing to deal with really drives your samplesize needs….You've got to take both of those things into consideration. How variable is my population and then how certain do I want to be? How much error am I willing to accept in my final estimate?"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.s01ep03Citation 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.s01ep01Citation formatter: https://citation.doi.org/