Wildlife By The Numbers

About Wildlife By The Numbers

Co-hosted by Grant Harris, PhD, along with statisticians David "Randy" Stewart, PhD, and Matthew Butler, PhD, the Wildlife By The Numbers podcast emphasizes the importance of proper statistical approaches in wildlife ecology. Grant, Randy, and Matt also share anecdotes to create awareness about the challenges and rewards of ecological research. The special feature episodes of Wildlife By The Numbers, co-hosted by Cinthia, "The databrarian", highlight data lifecycle topics that support the work of wildlife ecology professionals. https://iris.fws.gov/APPS/ServCat/Reference/Profile/181148

Publisher

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Category

education · science · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

8 May 2024

Latest episode

5 Dec 2025

Latest episodes

13 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   5 Dec 2025

   An overview of marked and unmarked techniques

   In this episode of Wildlife by the Numbers, hosts Matt, Grant, and Randy explore methods for estimating wildlife abundance using both marked and unmarked techniques. They discuss distance sampling, removal sampling, N-mixture models, capture-mark-recapture, and spatial capture-recapture. The conversation emphasizes the importance of robust study design, detection probability, and population closure assumptions in ecological research. Episode Quotes “Marked simply means you have an animal like an ocelot that has spots… so you can identify the same individuals over time based on their coat pattern.” “Distance sampling is a technique in which you take advantage of the fact that things are harder to see or detect at greater distances… and use that to estimate abundance.” “Spatial capture-recapture incorporates where animals were observed and where traps were located… helping produce more precise estimates of abundance and spatial distribution.” Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s02ep01 DOI Citation Formatter: https://citation.doi.org/ Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

2. 

   14 Nov 2025

   A discussion of precision examples and SMART

   In this episode, Matt, Grant, and Randy explore the importance of precision, variability, and detection probability in wildlife surveys. They emphasize the need for SMART objectives—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—in designing effective monitoring programs. Real-world examples, including bighorn sheep and Rio Yaqui fishes, illustrate how survey design, observation error, and risk management influence conservation outcomes. Episode Quotes “When you have observation error, site-specific variability, and temporal changes over time—that’s a lot of variance to consider when designing a survey.” “Before you start doing a survey, ask: how is this answer going to affect what you do?” Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep012 DOI Citation Formatter: https://citation.doi.org/ Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

3. 

   29 Aug 2025

   How Precise is Precise Enough?

   Grant, Matt, and Randy gear up to discuss precision, accuracy, and variability in wildlife studies. They dive into how variability measures data spread, using range, quartiles, standard deviation, variance, and coefficient of variation (CV). Accuracy reflects closeness to the true value, precision shows clustering of estimates. Standard errors, confidence intervals, and Bayesian credibility intervals quantify estimate precision. Required precision depends on study goals, sample size, and application, ensuring reliable, interpretable, and actionable results for wildlife management and conservation. They wrap up with some examples, but the take home message is deciding how precise results need to be hinges on the question and resources. Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep011 DOI Citation Formatter: https://citation.doi.org/ Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

4. 

   25 Apr 2025

   Different flavors of random sampling

   Which flavor of sampling would you use? In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Grant, Matt, and Randy have a conversation on the different flavors of sampling. They begin with random sampling, then move on to stratified sampling and two stage sampling. Finishing up this flavor fest of sampling with focus sampling. Examples in this episode include snails and warblers. They even talk a little bit about their earlier tomato garden examples. Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/) Cite this episode: https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep010 (https://doi.org/10.7944/usfws.wbtn.s01ep010) Citation formatter: https://citation.doi.org/

5. 

   7 Feb 2025

   Wildlife By The Numbers Ep9 Peer-review publication Part 3

   Matt, Grant, and Randy finish up the discussion on peer-review publication highlighting their process for selecting journals, getting the submission ready, the review and handling rejections. Randy describes the process as both an author and an associate editor. From this episode: "Randy, what happens after an author submits a paper? How how does that work from a journal standpoint?" "Well, it goes through their process, and then the editor or the chief editor distributes it down to the editor in charge of the paper, which then contacts and associates that paper, with the appropriate associate editor. And then at that time, the associate editor is responsible for creating a review team comprised of typically two to three reviewers."

6. 

   5 Dec 2024

   Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 8 Structure of a Scientific Paper Part 2

   Grant and Matt share expert insights on crafting a scientific paper, revealing best practices for writing, revising, and submitting to maximize impact.

7. 

   8 Nov 2024

   Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 7 Structure of a Scientific Paper Part 1

   In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Matt and Grant, a duo who has been co-authoring papers together for over a decade, give a candid discussion on publication to share your work. They have a lively discussion of how they write a scientific paper, and dive into the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections of a paper sharing how their writing was influenced by their professors as well. They have saved the abstract, editing, proofing, and deciding which journal to submit to for another episode. Quotes from this episode... "Writing is the backbone of what scientists do, and it's extremely important to write up what you're doing and present that in a format that has been reviewed by other scientists. At the most basic level, folks can understand that you wanna share your knowledge. But there's a number of reasons why you want to write a scientific paper, have that go through a a rigorous peer review, and then publish it. One of them is, as I just said, you wanna share the information so others can learn from it and others can build off it and improve and contribute to the field of wildlife biology or ecology or whatever science your your discipline you're working with and advance that field, help folks understand the issue that you're working on because it may it may spur other questions that they have or help them with the work that they're doing. Scientific writing also in that peer review process also brings credibility to your work." "Why in the world do we use such a format? Why is it not like if I do a presentation at a scientific meeting, I may do some methods and results to discuss that, and then start over again. And do that multiple times even for one smaller type that might be a chapter in a thesis or dissertation. I'm not gonna roll all my results together and talk through all those individual results and then discuss all of them afterwards, it just doesn't flow very well. So why in the world do we do it that way?" "What Stuart has impressed upon me is in your introduction, you have the first three hundred words is what's gonna grab your reader. And in that first three hundred words, you should speak to what the issue is that you're addressing, why it's important, why it matters, and then how you resolve it. So the first three hundred words, what's the issue? Why does it matter? And then how do you address it? And that's how he taught me to write it." Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

8. 

   4 Oct 2024

   Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 6 The importance of bias and why it matters in wildlife work.

   In this episode of Wildlife By The Numbers, Matt, Grant, and Randy talk about the importance of bias and why it matters in wildlife work. Episode Quotes: "...different ways we can address bias and introduce this topic. How would you go about talking about bias and how we can explain it to listeners and help them understand the importance of bias and why it matters in their wildlife work?" "...layman's terms, bias is when you're reporting something that's really not valid because either your technique or your approach has provided answers that are no longer representative." "Some good examples of the availability is oftentimes related to the animal's activity patterns. And so during the time of the survey, for instance, let's say for snakes and mussels, they could actually just be simply underground, especially for some of those snakes. So they're not available to be detected at that time of the survey." "The reason we have to be attentive to both this idea of detection and availability is if we're not paying attention to it, we will get biased answers because we're not accounting for those prairie dogs that are in their burrows, and we're not accounting for these animals that are far away that we may not that are available that we just can't detect. And so we have to we have to figure so in wildlife surveys, we have to use techniques that will account for those factors and eliminate or minimize the chance that they'll cause bias in your final results." "What is a true zero versus what is a what is a false zero? And the way detection works is if you go to a site and you didn't observe that the individual was present at the time of the survey, is it due to the fact that it wasn't simply present, or was it some other reason why you were not able to observe it specifically?" Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

9. 

   5 Sept 2024

   Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 5 Examples for Precision Estimates

   In this episode, Matt, Randy, and Grant dive into a discussion of more in-depth real world examples related to precision estimates. Episode Quotes "...when you're talking about sample size, you're often doing this game of optimization where I'm trying to optimize precision with costs because I may need a precision of ten percent, but if it's gonna cost me a million dollars to get it, then we need to rethink our goals and what what we're doing because that's probably not achievable. And so it's this...back and forth between costs and efficiencies. And how much precision do we need to be able to answer the questions at hand." "...we had a wealth of information that fed into various analyses, whether it was published or not published, that allowed us to really find a concrete way of moving that program forward. So that when we start seeing declines, let's say of a certain species in one of the ponds, we can start now over time being able to understand why that population is declining. What are the mechanisms behind it?" Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

10. 

    9 Aug 2024

    Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 4 Determining appropriate sample sizes to balance accuracy, precision, and resource allocation in wildlife studies

    In this episode of Wildlife by the Numbers, Grant, Matt, and Randy, delve into the importance of proper sample size in wildlife studies. They emphasize that an adequate sample size is crucial for obtaining accurate and precise data, which directly impacts the reliability of conservation efforts. Sample size ensures representativeness and precision, critical for drawing valid conclusions about wildlife populations. Matt explains that without a reasonable sample size, it is impossible to obtain a representative sample, leading to inaccurate estimations. The conversation touches on how over- or under-sampling can lead to either wasted resources or insufficient data, respectively. Randy discusses the challenges in achieving desired precision in various wildlife surveys, such as those involving fish in reservoirs, where spatial variability can complicate sampling. Overall, this episode underscores the necessity of determining appropriate sample sizes to balance accuracy, precision, and resource allocation in wildlife studies, ensuring that conservation and management strategies are based on robust scientific data. Episode Quotes: "...the two issues that are intertwined in in sample size. One is representativeness, which we've talked about already, and then the other is precision. Basically, how good is my estimate of that mean?" "So as a wildlife biologist, getting the right sample size is important because it'll also help you get good results. And it also makes sure that the effort you put out is commensurate with the with the precision of the results you want. So you're not under sampling and spending a lot of money and time and not getting a precise answer, and you're not oversampling by spending a lot of money and time and getting a really tight answer that you really don't need." "...but I do know what they're aiming for. And, typically, they partition it based on whether or not it's gonna be a management or a research question. With the research question aiming for a CV of ten to fifteen percent and then a management based question, a CV of twenty to twenty five percent is is acceptable."

11. 

    25 Jul 2024

    Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 3 Sample Size Needs

    Shifting focus to sample size determination, Matt, Grant, and Randy explore the challenges and considerations in choosing appropriate sample sizes for reliable ecological research. They discuss trade-offs, budget constraints, and introduce the concept of power analysis for enhancing the reliability of ecological studies. Quotes from this episode: "In this podcast, we're going to talk about sample size needs. How many samples does a person need to collect to get a representative sample of the population? So it leads us back to this whole representativeness idea. If a person samples too few, then there's a very good chance that person is going to include a disproportionate number of outliers, oddballs or anomalies in the sample." "...in the earlier episode we said, if all the plants have the same number of tomatoes we would just have to sample one of them. That was an invariant population. But we also spoke to that some plants had 100 tomatoes and some had none. And so we have extreme variability." "… (the amount) of uncertainty you're willing to deal with, and how much imprecision you're willing to deal with really drives your sample size needs….You've got to take both of those things into consideration. How variable is my population and then how certain do I want to be? How much error am I willing to accept in my final estimate?" Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

12. 

    7 Jun 2024

    Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 2 Random Sampling Challenges and Examples

    Delving into the significance of random sampling, hosts Matt, Grant, and Randy, use real-world examples to illustrate challenges associated with sampling, stressing the importance of random sampling for accurate representations of wildlife populations. Episode quotes "...my question for the group is, do you think, they can actually achieve their objectives with a sample size of one, with one transect inside a particular city. Do you think they can achieve that at the city scale?" " Inside that rectangle, they're placing, camera traps to monitor species richness across that gradient of habitat from the lowlands to the uplands." "...so to bring this home from where we began (referring back to episode 1), we had a garden with tomatoes in it, and now we have a city with wildlife in it. And so the garden area is is akin to our city area, and our the number of tomatoes in the garden that we wanna know the number of is is a parallel to the wildlife we want to sample in that city." Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

13. 

    8 May 2024

    Wildlife By The Numbers Episode 1 Random Sampling

    Hosts Matthew Butler, Grant Harris, and Randy Stewart set the stage for Wildlife by the Numbers emphasizing the importance of proper scientific approaches in wildlife ecology and sharing anecdotes to create awareness about the challenges and rewards of ecological research. Episode quotes: "Today, we're gonna talk about an issue that we often confront with biologists, particularly young biologists that are just getting into wildlife work and understanding statistics and science well, conservation science design of of studies, and that is random sampling and the importance of random sampling and why it matters. To help introduce this topic, we'll start with, a simple example, and then we'll get into more wildlife oriented issues. So for the simple example, I have a big garden, and it's large. It's it's an acre in size." "Okay. So now that we know we need to to sample, so to not count everything but parts of it, and we want those parts to be representative, how do we then get that representative sample? What do what procedure do we have to use to make sure that sample represents the population at large?" "And so that's why we were talking about we wanna make sure that when we sample, we are doing it in a random way to account for the differences in number of tomatoes on each plant to make sure we have an accurate representation of the true count in that garden." Episode music: Shapeshifter by Mr Smith (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/) is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/ (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/mr-smith/studio-city/shapeshifter/)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

12,316,839

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

8 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 47 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

44

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

32

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