Week 3 Reflection - Study Design
I’m glad that we had a dedicated lecture for study design. It’s not only helpful for our projects, but for current and future research endeavors. It’s also nice to see that conversation happen ‘formally’ in a course, instead of just being taught through the grapevine or by trial and error. I personally really liked the discussion on multiple competing hypotheses and occupancy modelling. I think that both will be useful to use and/or know about for my research, and the timing of the lecture was very convenient as I am currently doing a lot of planning.
I thought the DeSouza (2016) paper tied in nicely to our discussion on study design. My main takeaways were to know your species, do your homework, and be intentional with how you set up and carry out sampling / analysis. With deadlines, seasonal windows, and other pressures that push researchers to just get out and sample now, it is important to remember to take as much care as you can to organize your sampling around the details of your study species and research questions. However, as we discussed a bit in class, this is not a perfect world and sampling resources, teams, and goals can be fluid. I think it is also important to be flexible, transparent, and account for any changes that you might have made. And at the end of the day, science isn’t perfect. We just have to do the best we can with what we have.