Sampling re-design increases power to detect change in the Great Barrier Reef’s inshore water quality
Lloyd-Jones, Luke R., Kuhnert, Petra M., Lawrence, Emma, Lewis, Stephen E., Waterhouse, Jane, Gruber, Renee K., and Kroon, Frederieke J. (2022) Sampling re-design increases power to detect change in the Great Barrier Reef’s inshore water quality. PLoS ONE, 17 (7). e0271930.
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Abstract
Monitoring programs are fundamental to understanding the state and trend of aquatic ecosystems. Sampling designs are a crucial component of monitoring programs and ensure that measurements evaluate progress toward clearly stated management objectives, which provides a mechanism for adaptive management. Here, we use a well-established marine monitoring program for inshore water quality in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Australia to investigate whether a sampling re-design has increased the program’s capacity to meet its primary objectives. Specifically, we use bootstrap resampling to assess the change in statistical power to detect temporal water quality trends in a 15-year inshore marine water quality data set that includes data from both before and after the sampling re-design. We perform a comprehensive power analysis for six water quality analytes at four separate study areas in the GBR Marine Park and find that the sampling re-design (i) increased power to detect trends in 23 of the 24 analyte-study area combinations, and (ii) resulted in an average increase in power of 34% to detect increasing or decreasing trends in water quality analytes. This increase in power is attributed more to the addition of sampling locations than increasing the sampling rate. Therefore, the sampling re-design has substantially increased the capacity of the program to detect temporal trends in inshore marine water quality. Further improvements in sampling design need to focus on the program’s capability to reliably detect trends within realistic timeframes where inshore improvements to water quality can be expected to occur.
| Item ID: | 76485 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1932-6203 |
| Copyright Information: | © 2022 Lloyd-Jones et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Date Deposited: | 29 Mar 2023 01:03 |
| FoR Codes: | 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410402 Environmental assessment and monitoring @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1805 Marine systems and management > 180505 Measurement and assessment of marine water quality and condition @ 100% |
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