Composite sampling: A novel method to accomplish observational economy in environmental studies: A monograph introduction

This monograph on composite sampling, co-authored by Patil, Gore, and Taillie provides, for the first time, a most comprehensive statistical account of composite sampling as an ingenious environmental sampling method to help accomplish observational economy in a variety of environmental and ecological studies. Sampling consists of selection, acquisition, and quantification of a part of the population. But often what is desirable is not affordable, and what is affordable is not adequate. How do we deal with this dilemma? Operationally, composite sampling recognizes the distinction between selection, acquisition, and quantification. In certain applications, it is a common experience that the costs of selection and acquisition are not very high, but the cost of quantification, or measurement, is substantially high. In such situations, one may select a sample sufficiently large to satisfy the requirement of representativeness and precision and then, by combining several sampling units into composites, reduce the cost of measurement to an affordable level. Thus composite sampling offers an approach to deal with the classical dilemma of desirable versus affordable sample sizes, when conventional statistical methods fail to resolve the problem. Composite sampling, at least under idealized conditions, incurs no loss of information for estimating the population means. But an important limitation to the method has been the loss of information on individual sample values, such as the extremely large value. In many of the situations where individual sample values are of interest or concern, composite sampling methods can be suitably modified to retrieve the information on individual sample values that may be lost due to compositing. In this monograph, we present statistical solutions to these and other issues that arise in the context of applications of composite sampling. The monograph is published in the Monograph Series: Environmental and Ecological Statistics <http://www.springer.com/series/7506>, vol. 4, The authors are Patil, Ganapati P., Gore, Sharad D., Taillie, Charles with the monograph co-ordinates,1st Edition., 2011, XIII, 275 p. 47 illus., SpringerLink <http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-1-4419-7627-7>, Hardcover, >  ISBN 978-1-4419-7627-7.     

Estimating animal densities and home range in regions with irregular boundaries and holes: A lattice-based alternative to the kernel density estimator

Density estimates based on point processes are often restrained to regions with irregular boundaries or holes. We propose a density estimator, the lattice-based density estimator, which produces reasonable density estimates under these circumstances. The estimation process starts with overlaying the region with nodes, linking these together in a lattice and then computing the density of random walks of length k on the lattice. We use an approximation to the unbiased crossvalidation criterion to find the optimal walk length k. The technique is illustrated using walleye (Sander vitreus) radiotelemetry relocations in Lake Monroe, Indiana. We also use simulation to compare the technique to the traditional kernel density estimate in the situation where there are no significant boundary effects.