Spatially Balanced Survey Designs Incorporating Legacy Sites for Marine Biodiversity

A method for integrating legacy monitoring sites into new spatially balanced survey designs to reduce uncertainty in ecological inferences. The approach is illustrated using a proposed survey of a large marine reserve in South-Eastern Australia. An R-package called MBHdesign, available from CRAN, implements these methods.

Use Cases

• Designing efficient biodiversity surveys based on the concept of spatial balance.
• Incorporating legacy site time-series data into new monitoring designs based on the described methodology.
• Reducing uncertainty in population mean estimates for marine reserves based on simulation results mentioned in the description.
• Aiding integrated monitoring programs by providing a tool to design surveys around established ones.

Strengths

• Method is supported by simulation experiments indicating increased spatial balance and smaller standard errors.
• Illustrated with a concrete case study for a large marine reserve in South-Eastern Australia.
• Implementation is available via a published R-package (MBHdesign) on CRAN.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Methodological proposal and simulation, illustrated with a case study.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-10 22:23:29.781857; freshness should be verified.

Geography

South-Eastern Australia (large marine reserve)