2.0.3 Structure and nomenclature example

Each coho spawning season (November – March), ODFW staff visit sites within the potential spawning range of the Oregon coast coho salmon. Sites are chosen in manner that allows abundance estimates for each biological population.  Sites are visited multiple times, roughly every 10 days, and all live and dead fish are counted.  To estimate spawner abundance for a run year, an area under the curve (AUC) analysis is constructed for each site, based on the multiple visits. Then these estimates are expanded to a biological population estimate based on the inference design. 

In this case, the measurements are live and dead fish counts at a site at a visit.  The metric for each site is the total number of spawners at a site over the spawning period. Finally, the indicator is the total number of spawners, expanded over spatial sites containing portions of the population, in order to describe the size of an entire spawning population for a year.

In this case, the response design (the analysis procedure and the data collection procedure) consists of the protocol to take the measurement and apply an AUC analysis to go from individual fish counts at a single occasion (measurement) to the total number fish at a site in the year (the metric). The response design describes how to produce the final metric, fish per kilometer.  The inference design takes this set of site-scale metrics and estimates the (statistical) population-scale indicator over the spatial domain of a (demographic) population (the indicator). 

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