Teaching Scientific Design in Conservation Engineering Through Distance Learning, e-Networking, and a Research Practicum

Conservation engineering involves a collaboration between scientists and fishermen in which each partner lends complementary expertise to solving the problem.  An intuitive approach to teaching sampling design and statistical methods for collaborative research helps students to effectively communicate the ideas associated with highly technical concepts to fishing partners.  Scientific partners are responsible for maintaining representative and powerful sampling design as well as an appropriate analytical design to test the effectiveness of the engineering solutions, while actively listening to fishermen’s input and being flexible enough to accommodate contingencies in field work.  Statistical approaches should be communicated as clear testable hypotheses, so that all partners can agree on a consensus interpretation of results. Sampling needs to represent the population of inference, and fishermen’s expertise can help to define patterns of variation for stratified designs to get the most information from limited sample sizes.   Fishermen can also suggest ancillary factors that can either be experimentally controlled or statistically standardized.  The additional burden of teaching scientific design for collaborative research is that the students are expected to be conversant in the statistical concepts, so that they can get the most out of the collaborative partnership.