Designing Your Experiment

The Decision support tool is a self-help exercise that can be filled in on line or alternatively each of the iterative loops can be downloaded as a Word document and filled in.

It is envisaged that the completed documents can be discussed with supervisors, within lab group meetings or with mentors. The documents can then be further amended, revised and the initial experimental designs refined in preparation for the next strand of the Best Practice Guide – MEDDLE – Multiple Environmental Driver Design Lab for Experiments.

The decision support tool is not designed to be used as a means to seek feedback from the SCOR WG149. The WG members instead have provided a publication on approaches to experimental design, a handbook (both available to download on the front page of the www site), and a series of video tutorials. Each of these features will help you fill out the sections of the Decision Support Tool.

Each step of the guide takes you through a different stage of the planning process: (1) defining the research question, (2) identifying responses, drivers and the design and (3) finalising the design.

This Guide can be completed by downloading Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 (word document templates) or by using the three buttons below.

What exactly is your research question?
Be as precise as possible.
What are the objectives of your study?
What do you aim to achieve?
Has anyone already tried to answer a similar research question?
Will this be a manipulative and/or observational study (or still unknown)?
Will this be a laboratory or a field study?
What are the environmental drivers that may affect your study?
What is the pre-requisite biological knowledge for designing a study to answer your research question? Is that knowledge already available?
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What is the nature of the study?
Will this be a study to understand the mechanisms of the response under study?
Or do you want to know how species or ecosystems will respond to different environmental scenarios?
What are the relevant spatial scales?
How many experiment units will you have?
What biological responses are most relevant?
Which biota specifically?
Which specific biological responses/traits will you measure, and how will you measure them?
Are these the most relevant or most tractable responses/traits?
What additional biological processes/parameters may affect the responses?
Which driver/s are most relevant?
What specific driver/s you want to measure or manipulate?
Do adequate environmental/field data already exist to tell you what you need to know?
If not, will you measure these drivers?
Are other drivers more easily measured or more tractable and can be used as proxy for the driver you are interested in?
For exposure experiments: what are their regionally environmentally relevant levels?
Do you need to measure additional drivers? What secondary drivers may be altered by your primary driver?
Please enter your email address so we can send you the plan you have designed above*

Don't worry about spam etc, we will never use your email for any other purposes.

M

Decision Support Tool

Designing Your Experiment

What is the nature of the study?

What biological responses are most relevant?

Which driver/s are most relevant?

Response variables/traits of interest

Explanatory variables/drivers of interest:

Experimental design and statistical analyses?

What resources do you need, and do you have access to all of them?