2.4.1 Inference design: Overview

Overview    Status    Temporal    Spatial    Results and next steps

Up to this point in developing your monitoring design, you’ve spent quite a bit of time describing your specific goals and objectives and how you expect to achieve them through the integration of your choice of indicators and your spatial, temporal, and response designs.  This is a great point to evaluate whether the design pieces that you’ve assembled for your monitoring program will allow you to meet your objectives.  This section illustrates some ways you can evaluate how well your designs might meet your objectives and points to some tools that are useful in this process.  Clearly, we cannot cover all situations that you are likely to face.  However, we will set up a framework within which you can conduct your evaluation.  Our framework is organized around three categories or types of objectives (or types of indicators): status; temporal pattern (including trend); and spatial pattern.  However, we recognize that the distinctions among these categories is not always clear, as will be evident.

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