Planning Marine Field Studies

This chapter presents various ways to design a scientific survey for marine field studies, including a description of the most used designs. This is followed by descriptions of some currently employed survey designs for littoral and benthos field studies: an oceanic survey to estimate the abundance of mackerel; a bottom trawl survey to monitor demersal fish populations; a hydroacoustic survey to study the diel vertical migration of mesopelagic organisms, and lastly, a survey design to study barotrauma in physoclistous fish species. The design of a survey can influence the outcomes of the analysis implementing a design that will allow for answering the question without bias is crucial. There are two standard survey designs for field studies. One common design is a stratified random survey. The other common survey design for field studies is a systematic survey. An important aspect for designing a field survey is to determine how and how much to sample at each station.