Applied statistics in ecology: Common pitfalls and simple solutions

Ecosphere

Volumn 4, Issue 9, 2013, Pages

  Steel, E Ashley ^a   Kennedy, Maureen C ^b   Cunningham, Patrick G ^c   Stanovick, John S ^d  

^a PACIFIC NORTHWEST RESEARCH STATION   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

^c PACIFIC NORTHWEST RESEARCH STATION   (United States)

^d USDA FOREST SERVICE   (United States)

Author keywords

Confidence intervals; Errors; Experimental design; Graphing; Mistakes; P values; Statistics education

Indexed keywords

EID: 84901048274     PISSN: None     EISSN: 21508925     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1890/ES13-00160.1     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Altman, D.G., and Bland J.M. 1995. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. British Medical Journal 311:485.
2. Anscombe, F.J. 1973. Graphs in statistical analysis. American Statistician 27:17-21.
3. Barbet-Massin, M., Jiguet F., Albert C.H., and Thuiller W. 2012. Selecting pseudo-absences for species distribution models: how, where and how many? Methods Ecology and Evolution 3:327-338.
4. Benjamini, Y. and Hochberg Y. 1995. Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Methodological) 57:289-300.
5. Bensinger, K. 2012. Number crunchers defeat pundits in election predictions. Seattle Times November 8.
6. Breiman, L. 2001. Statistical modeling: The two cultures. Statistical Science 16:199-231. (Pubitemid 33636349)
7. Burnham, K.P. and Anderson D.R. 2002. Model selection and multi-model inference: a practical information-theoretic approach. Springer-Verlag, New York, New York, USA.
8. Chatfield, C. 2006. Model uncertainty: Encyclopedia of environmetrics. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.
9. Clayton, M.K. 2007. How should we achieve high-quality reporting of statistics in scientific journals? A commentary on "Guidelines for reporting statistics in journals published by the American Physiological Society". Advances in Physiology Education 31:302-304.
10. Fowler, N. 1990. The 10 most common statistical errors. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 71:161-164.
11. Fernandes-Taylor, S., Hyun J.K., Reeder R.N., and Harris A.H.S. 2011. Common statistical and research design problems in manuscripts submitted to high-impact medical journals. BMC Research Notes 4:304.
12. Ford, E.D. 2000. Scientific method for ecological research. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
13. Freedman, D.A. 1983. A note on screening regression equations. American Statistician 37:152-155.
14. García-Berthou, E., and Alcaraz C. 2004. Incongruence between test statistics and P values in medical papers. BMC Medical Research Methodology 4:13.
15. Glantz, S.A. 1980. Biostatistics: how to detect, correct and prevent errors in the medical literature. Circulation 61:1-7.
16. Good, P.I., and Hardin J.W. 2003. Common errors in statistics (and how to avoid them). John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.
17. Goodman, S. 2008. A dirty dozen: Twelve p-value misconceptions. Seminars in Hematology 45:135-140. (Pubitemid 351876117)
18. Grissom, R.J., and Kim J.J. 2005. Effect sizes for research: univariate and multivariate applications. Routledge, New York, New York, USA.
19. Gurevitch, J., and Chester S.T. 1986. Analysis of repeated measures experiments. Ecology 67:251-255.
20. He, H., and Garcia E.A. 2009. Learning from imbalanced data. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 21:1263-1284.
21. Higgs, M.D. 2013. Do we really need the s-word? American Scientist 101:6-9.
22. Hurlbert, S.H. 1984. Pseudoreplication and the design of ecological field experiments. Ecological Monographs 54:187-211.
23. Ionnidis, J.P.A. 2005. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med 2(8).
24. Liang, K., and Zeger S.L. 1986. Longitudinal data analysis using generalized linear models. Biome-trika 73:13-22.
25. Littell, R.C., Milliken G.A., Stroup W.W., and Wolfinger R.D. 1996. SAS system for mixed models. SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina, USA.
26. Lucero, Y., Steel E.A., Burnett K.M., and Christiansen K. 2011. Untangling human development and natural gradients: implications of underlying correlation structure for linking landscapes and riverine ecosystems. 19:207-224.
27. Ma, Y., and Guttorp P. 2013. Estimating daily mean temperature from synoptic climate observations. International Journal of Climatology 33:1264-1269.
28. Magnusson, W.E. 1997. Teaching experimental design in ecology, or how to do statistics without a bikini. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 78:205-209.
29. Mallows, C. 1998. 1997 Fisher Memorial Lecture: The zeroth problem. American Statistician 52:1-9.
30. Martin, T.G., Wintle B.A., Rhodes J.R., Kuhnert P.M., Field S.A., Low-Choy S.J., Tyre A.J., and Possingham H.P. 2005. Zero tolerance ecology: improving ecological inference by modelling the source of zero observations. Ecology Letters 8:1235-1246. (Pubitemid 41532407)
31. O'Hara, R.B., and Kotze D.J. 2010. Do not logtransform count data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 1:118-122.
32. Peterson, E.E. et al. 2013. Modelling dendritic ecological networks in space: an integrated network perspective. Ecology Letters 16:707-719.
33. Potts, J.M., and Elith J. 2006. Comparing species abundance models. Ecological Modeling 199:153-163. (Pubitemid 44572636)
34. Roni, P., Liermann M.C., Jordan C., and Steel E.A. 2005. Steps for designing a monitoring and evaluation program for aquatic restoration. Pages 13-34 in P. Roni, editor. Monitoring stream and watershed restoration. American Fisheries Society, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
35. SAS Institute Inc. 2011. SAS/STAT 9.3 user's guide. SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina, USA.
36. Snee, R.D. 1990. Statistical thinking and its contribution to total quality. American Statistician 44:116-121.
37. Squire, P. 1988. Why the 1936 Literary Digest poll failed. Public Opinion Quarterly 52:125-133.
38. Strasak, A.M., Zaman Q., Marinell G., Pfeiffer K.P., and Ulmer H. 2007. The use of statistics in medical research. American Statistician 61:47-55.
39. Thompson, III, F.R. 2010. Editor's Message: Application and presentation of statistics. Journal of Wildlife Management 74:617-619.
40. Warton, D., and Hui F.K.C. 2011. The arcsine is asinine: the analysis of proportions in ecology. Ecology 92:3-10.
41. Wild, C.J., and Pfannkuch M. 1999. Statistical thinking in empirical inquiry. International Statistical Review 67:223-265.
42. Zuur, A.F., leno E.N., and Elphick C.S. 2010. A protocol for data exploration to avoid common statistical problems. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 1:3-14.