conbio-study-design

Study Design (conbio-study-design)

Conservation Biology accepts many methodologies but is demanding about each. The design must credibly connect the conservation question (conbio-topic-selection) to evidence that supports a transferable, decision-relevant conclusion. This skill is mode-aware: pick the section that matches your work and defend it against the strongest alternative explanation.

When to trigger

• Specifying sampling, comparison, or modeling design before fieldwork or analysis
• A reviewer questioned detection, replication, spatial autocorrelation, or causal claims
• Designing an intervention/management evaluation or a synthesis protocol
• Justifying why your design adjudicates the rival account from conbio-literature-positioning

Field & observational ecology

• Account for detection. Imperfect detection biases counts — use occupancy, distance sampling, or capture-recapture rather than raw indices when detection varies.
• Replication and scale. Avoid pseudoreplication; define the independent unit; match the spatial and temporal scale of sampling to the inference. State the sampling frame.
• Spatial structure. Address spatial autocorrelation and spatial bias (sampling effort, access).

Comparative / quasi-experimental (intervention evaluation)

• Use BACI / before-after-control-impact, control-impact, or matched designs to attribute change to a conservation action rather than to background trend.
• Counterfactual thinking. What would have happened without the protected area / policy / harvest rule? Matching, difference-in-differences, or synthetic controls where appropriate.
• State confounders (accessibility, prior condition) and how the design or analysis handles them.

Modeling & synthesis

• SDM / niche / population models: justify predictors, address sampling bias and collinearity, validate out-of-sample; state transferability limits before projecting.
• Systematic review / meta-analysis: follow PRISMA / CEE protocols; preregister where possible; document search, screening, and effect-size extraction.

Human dimensions / social science

• Match the method (surveys, interviews, choice experiments) to the question; report sampling, ethics, consent, and how respondent identity and sensitive data are protected.

The adjudication test (journal-specific)

For the single strongest rival explanation, write one sentence: "If the rival were true rather than my conclusion, the data would look like ___; instead they look like ___." If you cannot, the design does not yet support a transferable conservation claim.

Anti-patterns

• Raw counts treated as abundance with no detection model
• Pseudoreplication; inference at a scale the sampling cannot support
• "Effect of the intervention" with no counterfactual or control
• SDM/model projected far outside its training range with no transferability caveat
• A design that cannot distinguish your conclusion from the leading alternative

Operating pass for Conservation Biology

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the species/system threat, conservation decision, and uncertainty relevant to action; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: conservation-science reviewers who ask whether evidence changes biodiversity, management, or policy action.

• Do the pass: Return a claim-evidence-risk ledger rather than a prose-only diagnosis; every recommendation must point to a manuscript location or missing artifact.
• Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
• Sibling guard: compare against Biological Conservation for applied conservation breadth, Global Change Biology for climate/ecosystem process, Ecology Letters for theory-forward ecology; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
• Submission-ready gate: do not give final advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for upload-week rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Mode】field-ecology / quasi-experimental / modeling-synthesis / human-dimensions
【Question / estimand】what is being measured or attributed
【Key assumption(s)】detection, scale, counterfactual, transferability — how each is defended
【Rival ruled out】the adjudication sentence
【Robustness/sensitivity】planned checks
【Next】conbio-data-analysis

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — occupancy, capture-recapture, SDM, BACI, and synthesis tooling
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — reviewer expectations and scope