Trend Workshop General Introduction

Goal of Workshop

• Provide advice about reasonable approaches to estimation of change from NPS monitoring data
• Provide examples of these approaches, applied (when possible) to NPS data
• Encapsulate advice/examples in accessible formats

Open Discussion On a Variety Of Issues

• Address range of reasonable approaches
• Define the cookbook
• Discuss advantages/disadvantages of each
• Particular focus on population surveys
• Most of first day
• Critical component
• Identify approaches not covered

Any Analysis of Monitoring Data Should be Defined Before Any Data are Collected!

• Most of the discussion and controversy about monitoring data is a direct consequence of a failure to clearly define goals of monitoring
• Most data collected without direct connection to uses of data are unlikely to be particularly useful for any goal!
• Painfully obvious in examples

Why Have This Discussion?

• Goals (and hence analysis) not clearly defined before monitoring developed
• For some reason, original design not complete, or complicated by factors arising during analysis
• New methods developed to allow more efficient analysis of data

Points to Consider

• Broader issues
• Limitations of present designs
• Scope of Inference
• Detectability
• Focusing of goals
• Planning future activities
• Direct analysis advice and issues
• Getting the most information from existing data

Many Other Topics Could Be Addressed

• Extreme value identification
• Estimation of abundance from replicate counts
• Direct estimation of λ

Issues To Address In Analysis

• Variance components
• Scale of aggregation
• Repeated measures
• Simplicity vs complexity
• Simple description
• Hypothesis tests
• Covariate analysis
• Connection to management/science