Staggered nested designs to identify hierarchical scales of variability

Abstract

Staggered nested sampling designs are virtually unknown in biology, but are widely used in manufacturing because they are highly efficient. I used a staggered nested design to address variation in the abundance of an intertidal clam Austrovenus stutchburyi (Gray) at four spatial scales. The scales were addressed by sampling cells containing five samples spaced at 50, 5, 0.5, and 0.05 m from one another. Estimates of variation from staggered nested designs can be made via ANOVA and principal component methods. ANOVA and principal component methods estimated roughly equal variability among those four spatial scales of abundance, and at all but the smallest scales variances were estimated very imprecisely. Staggered nested designs are highly efficient, applicable to any nested design, and deserve to be investigated more widely. © 2001, Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.