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 sample

size 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.s01ep03

Citation formatter: https://citation.doi.org/