MEDDLE — SCOR Working Group 149

MEDDLE

OUR GUIDE TO RUNNING BEST PRACTICE EXPERIMENTS IN MULTI-DRIVER RESEARCH

This three-step guide will help you identify relevant drivers and design your experiment.

Each step of the guide takes you through a different stage of the planning process:

Defining the research question,
Identifying responses, drivers and the design and
Finalising the design.

This guide can be completed using our document template or a web form using the three buttons below. If you choose the web form, the decision support tool output will be sent you to by email.

First pass: Broadly define the research questions

Email Address

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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Second pass: Identify responses, drivers and design

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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Web-tool created by Axel Durand on behalf of SCOR WG149