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
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Account for detection. Imperfect detection biases counts — use occupancy, distance sampling, or
capture-recapture rather than raw indices when detection varies.
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Replication and scale. Avoid pseudoreplication; define the independent unit; match the spatial
and temporal scale of sampling to the inference. State the sampling frame.
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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.
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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
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SDM / niche / population models: justify predictors, address sampling bias and collinearity,
validate out-of-sample; state transferability limits before projecting.
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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.
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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.
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Return a ledger: give
claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
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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.
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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
