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MONITORING AND ASSESSING THE CONDITION OF AQUATIC RESOURCES: ROLE OF COMPLEX SURVEY DESIGN AND ANALYSIS
Citation:
Olsen, A R. MONITORING AND ASSESSING THE CONDITION OF AQUATIC RESOURCES: ROLE OF COMPLEX SURVEY DESIGN AND ANALYSIS. Presented at Department of Statistics, Colorado State Univ, Ft. Collins, CO, April 23, 2004.
Description:
The National Water Quality Monitoring Council (NWQMC) developed a common framework for aquatic resource monitoring. The framework is described in a series of articles published in Water Resources IMPACT, September, 2003. One objective of the framework is to encourage consistency across the large number of aquatic monitoring programs operating within the United States. Statistical design (site selection) and statistical analysis (estimation) are two key elements in the framework. I will focus on these elements. First, a brief overview of large-scale aquatic monitoring is given focusing on programs whose objectives are to estimate the condition of the aquatic resource. This provides the background for introducing complex survey designs and their critical role in the scientific defensibility of monitoring program results. The spatially-balanced GRTS survey design is introduced and example applications given. Equally important is matching the statistical analysis to the statistical survey design. The estimation of the proportion of sites occupied when detection of a species is imperfect is used to illustrate how standard estimation procedures based on simple random sampling must be modified to account for the complex survey design.