Design Your Experiment

Identifying the influences of ocean change on local and global scales is a complex task. However, a carefully designed experiment can help you contribute information needed for the development of science-based policy.

Before you start the steps below to design a meaningful experiment, we suggest you read Experimental strategies to study multiple drivers – a review and the MEDDLE Handbook.

Once you’ve read the review, use MEDDLE’s 5-step guide (downloadable word template) to design and carry out multiple driver ocean change experiments. Each step of the guide takes you through a different stage of the planning process:

Step 1: define the research question
Step 2: identify biological traits
Step 3: after watching the developing a driver inventory video, identify relevant local and global drivers
Step 4: after watching the experimental design and data analysis videos, develop an experimental design and analysis plan
Step 5: identify the necessary resources to carry out your experiment.

As you work through these steps, you may find it useful to explore MEDDLE’s additional resources, where you will find introductory material about single and multiple drivers and video tutorials.

Once you complete the 5-step guide, move on to the meddle simulator to run virtual experiments that mimic typical responses of marine organisms to multiple drivers.

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?
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M

Multiple driver experimental design

Design 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?