Statistical Package for Improved Analysis of Hillslope Monitoring Data Collected as Part of the Board of Forestry's Long-Term Monitoring Program.

摘要

The State of California has embarked upon a Long-Term Monitoring Program whose primary goal is to assess the effectiveness of the Forest Practice Rules and Review Process in protecting the beneficial uses of waters from the impacts of timber operations on private timberlands. The Board of Forestrys Monitoring Study Group concluded that hillslope monitoring should be used to assess Rule implementation and effectiveness at preventing erosion and maintaining canopy cover, while instream monitoring would be used to assess conditions and trends in water quality and stream channels. The objectives and tasks of this report (distilled from the Study Plan) are to: (1) Evaluate and propose various statistical techniques, including nonparametric statistics, that can be used to analyze the kind of data collected on the 17 Timber Harvest Plans (THPs) during the Pilot Monitoring Program. (2) Provide guidelines for determining necessary sample sizes to achieve a specified degree of certainty in hypothesis testing and estimation. (3) Evaluate the sampling design and provide advice on how it might be improved. Assess the scope of the inferences that can be made. (4) Discuss the statistical compromises that may be necessary and recommend ways to address identified weaknesses.