Quantifying and addressing the prevalence and bias of study designs in the environmental and social sciences.

Building trust in science and evidence-based decision-making depends heavily on the credibility of studies and their findings. Researchers employ many different study designs that vary in their risk of bias to evaluate the true effect of interventions or impacts. Here, we empirically quantify, on a large scale, the prevalence of different study designs and the magnitude of bias in their estimates.

Methods for Image-based Surveys of Benthic Macroinvertebrates and Their Habitat Exemplified by the Drop Camera Survey for the Atlantic Sea Scallop.

Underwater imaging has long been used in the field of marine ecology but decreasing costs of high-resolution cameras and data storage have made the approach more practical than in the past. Image-based surveys allow for initial samples to be revisited and are non-invasive compared to traditional survey methods that typically involve nets or dredges. Protocols for image-based surveys can vary greatly but should be driven by target species behavior and survey objectives.

Identification of persistent benthic assemblages in areas with different temperature variability patterns through broad-scale mapping.

Ecosystem-based management is a place-based approach that considers the relationships between system parts. Due to the complexity of ecosystems in the marine environment it is often difficult to define these relationships in space and time. Maps illustrate spatial concepts.

Bait and the susceptibility of American lobsters Homarus americanus to epizootic shell disease.

Shell disease (SD) has been observed in lobster populations for almost a hundred years, but recently, rates of an epizootic form of shell disease (ESD) have increased in the southern New England (USA) area. A large proportion of fish in the diet of American lobsters Homarus americanus has been linked to increased rates of SD. Therefore, the use of fish as lobster bait may be linked to increased ESD rates in lobsters.

Measuring fish abundance in a weir trap using an acoustical-optical platform.

Data recorded by a bottom mounted survey platform deployed within the opening of a fishing weir were used to calculate species specific abundance estimates for comparison to the weir catch. Abundance estimates were calculated from the combination of sonar and video information recorded by the Acoustical-Optical Platform (AOP). Echo counting was used to detect individual moving targets in the sonar images with the application of a background removal technique utilizing a moving average filter.