Survey Design
To me, survey design is one of the most important and difficult parts of the scientific process as it encompasses every part of it. To have a good survey design you need to be thinking about what you already know, what you want to know, and what kind of analysis are you going to do. This step is especially difficult when dealing with living organisms because there are so many factors that cannot be predicted, and nothing ever seems to go according to plan. As a result of this unpredictability, the survey design needs to be as detailed as possible to try and eliminate any errors or at least have a plan put in for anything that might go wrong. Because survey design is so important and difficult, undergraduate science classes tend to focus on good experimental design and gets you to think about super specific details and make sure you think about everything that could go wrong. All of this training in experimental design has made me appear as a pessimist to some people outside of the scientific community because I always think about the worst case scenario, but I always see it as wanting to be prepared incase something goes wrong. I think that this different perspective is a result of my scientific training. All of this to say that there are a lot of factors that go into survey design, and the paper discussed in class this week is one of the first to bring seasonality into the study of eDNA and detection probabilities. The paper did get across a good point about knowing and incorporating the biology of your study organism into your survey design, but I also think it is important to know the actual cause of the difference in detection probability. I was also surprised by the difference of detection probability overall between the two organisms of interest. The paper overall was really interesting, and it was neat to see how much the eDNA field has evolved since this paper was written.