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.s02ep01

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

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In this episode, Matt, Grant, and Randy explore the importance of precision, variability, and detection probability in wildlife surveys. They emphasize the need for SMART objectives—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—in designing effective monitoring programs. Real-world examples, including bighorn sheep and Rio Yaqui fishes, illustrate how survey design, observation error, and risk management influence conservation outcomes.

Episode Quotes

“When you have observation error, site-specific variability, and temporal changes over time—that’s a lot of variance to consider when designing a survey.” 

“Before you start doing a survey, ask: how is this answer going to affect what you do?” 

Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep012

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

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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.s01ep011

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

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

Which flavor of sampling would you use?

In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Grant, Matt, and Randy have a conversation on the different flavors of sampling. They begin with random sampling, then move on to stratified sampling and two stage sampling. Finishing up this flavor fest of sampling with focus sampling. Examples in this episode include snails and warblers. They even talk a little bit about their earlier tomato garden examples.

Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep010

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

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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.s01ep09

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

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In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Grant and Matt continue their discussion on writing a scientific paper. They share with us writing the paper backwards by starting with the results, what to avoid in the discussion section, the abstract, title, and realistic number of drafts. Is 15 or 20 drafts a realistic number of drafts? Listen in and discover the answer.

Quotes from this episode:

"One of the things I see often happen in the discussion is people want to talk about things that are way outside the bounds of a particular study. So the study was designed to answer some specific question, and there's this desire usually to make the study answer questions that are kind of beyond that frame of inference."

"...he'll take a piece of the paper out and put in a new document. And that was just a huge help for me because I do get distracted by just the text on the paper and just the volume of text on the paper. So sometimes if I need to focus in on a paragraph or a section, I'll just cut that out and make a new document, and then just put it back in when I feel like I got it right."

In a future episode, they will cover choosing where to submit the paper and how to handle the review process.

Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep08

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

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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.s01ep07

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

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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?"

Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep06

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

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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.s01ep05

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

In this episode of Wildlife by the Numbers, Grant, Matt, and Randy, delve into the importance of proper sample size in wildlife studies. They emphasize that an adequate sample size is crucial for obtaining accurate and precise data, which directly impacts the reliability of conservation efforts. Sample size ensures representativeness and precision, critical for drawing valid conclusions about wildlife populations.

Matt explains that without a reasonable sample size, it is impossible to obtain a representative sample, leading to inaccurate estimations. The conversation touches on how over- or under-sampling can lead to either wasted resources or insufficient data, respectively. Randy discusses the challenges in achieving desired precision in various wildlife surveys, such as those involving fish in reservoirs, where spatial variability can complicate sampling.

Overall, this episode underscores the necessity of determining appropriate sample sizes to balance accuracy, precision, and resource allocation in wildlife studies, ensuring that conservation and management strategies are based on robust scientific data.

Episode Quotes:

"...the two issues that are intertwined in in sample size. One is representativeness, which we've talked about already,

and then the other is precision. Basically, how good is my estimate of that mean?"

"So as a wildlife biologist, getting the right sample size is important because it'll also help you get good results. And it also makes sure that the effort you put out is commensurate with the with the precision of the results you want. So you're not under sampling and spending a

lot of money and time and not getting a precise answer, and you're not oversampling by spending a lot of money and time and getting a really tight answer that you really don't need."

"...but I do know what they're aiming for. And, typically, they partition it based on whether or not it's gonna be a management or a research question. With the research question aiming for a CV of ten to fifteen percent and then a management based question, a CV of twenty to twenty five percent is is acceptable."

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/

Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep04

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