Urquhart and Kincaid, 1999

Urquhart, N. S., and T. M. Kincaid. 1999. Designs for detecting trends from repeated surveys of ecological resources. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics 4(4):404-414.

We report investigations on trend detection capability (power for linear trend) from repeated surveys of the same regional resource population.  The temporal sampling plans range from periodic revisits using panel designs to independent surveys at each point in time; the latter have only random revisits.  We view the resource of interest as a finite population, but characterize several features of the situation with components of variance.  The results show how components of variance for site, year and residual, and sampling fraction impact power to detect a specific trend.  The panel designs turn out to be far superior to independent surveys for detecting trend, and have other desireable features.