Dissertation Questionnaire On Loss In Biodiversity Of Coral Reefs

[connorsbala]

Hi there,

I'm a student at Staffordshire University and I am doing a dissertation on whether the decline in biodiversity of tropical coral reefs globally in the wild has had an impact on where aquarists source their specimens for their home aquaria or public aquarium from; whether they acquire captive bred species instead of wild caught marine animals in order to help conserve the natural populations of marine fish, invertebrates and coral. I shall be investigating this at a global scale, looking at coral reefs globally, marine aquarists internationally and at public aquariums also.

I would be extremely grateful if you could take the time to answer my short 10 question survey at the link provided below. Once all my information has been collated I am happy to post my findings on here.



Many thanks,

Connor



Survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KF6GGF2.

[biggles]

Sounds interesting mate, survey completed

[Deinonych]

Done. Good luck on your dissertation!

[meisel1]

done.... and good luck with your dissertation... cheers

[Wmich2008]

Done, good luck!

[gone fishin]

Done and good luck.

[andrzadr000]

Done good luck

[GroktheCube]

Survey completed, good luck!

[r-balljunkie]

bump you back up

[asudavew]

Done and good luck!

[aandfsoccr04]

Done.

[M.phenax]

Done. Good luck!

[tylersarah]

Completed

[jberthon]

Completed - Bump.

[malcojo]

Completed. Good Luck!

[Deep Reef]

completed

[msnwld]

Def sounds interesting. Completed one for you...

[jcolletteiii]

I'm going to play devil's advocate here because I work fairly often with statistics. A couple of questions for you -

1) Are there adequate surveys from past years to be able to show any kind of trend toward or away from captive grown/bred animals?

2) By collecting data in an on-line forum of active (and likely tech saavy) reefers, do you not think you are biasing your sample? I am thinking that sampling errors could abound due to: a) variably active nature of the users of reef central (lurkers vs highly active posters); b) by the age groupings (what age group tends to be most active in posting? This could possibly correlate to comfort with technology as well); c) web indexing - and this could definitely lead to non-representiveness in your sample, if this topic is indexed by a crawler and the right set of keywords is typed in by users seeking 'aquacultured corals' for example, your posting could be highly ranked. If it gets highly ranked with similar keywords, it could pull respondents with a higher likelihood to respond in a biased way; d) respondents in an internet-based forum are probably more likely to be frequent internet users (especially as a large part of the hobby is based on research), and thus respondents reached in this way may have more frequent access to media/news/spin sources that could sway your respondents one way or the other; e) respondents in an online forum where dissemination of information specifically on coral aquaculture is sought may be intrinsically biased; f) respondents in any online venue may be more likely to respond to a given poll if they relate personally to the topic; etc... etc... All of these potential problems of selection bias could skew your study one way or the other.

3) Does this study have adequate scope for a dissertation?

Please don't be offended by my question, I'm just curious - what is the 'big picture' takeaway message you hope to arrive at? Would your sudy be based mostly on statistical methods? Fieldwork? I am sure you know the problems with statistical methods and sampling. 99% of the time it works every time. Global warming is inversely proportional to the number of pirates globally. Is there a fieldwork component?