Back to the future: Little-used tools and principles of scientific inference can help disentangle effects of multiple stressors on freshwater ecosystems

Abstract

There are multiple tools for scientific inference that seem rarely used in research examining the effects of stressors on rivers caused by human impacts. Very few of these scientific tools are 'new'. While foundational to scientific methods, they seem to have been overlooked or forgotten. The thesis of this paper is that, by looking back to what used to be considered basic knowledge about scientific methods and the discipline of ecology, we may re-learn some useful ways of improving survey designs and re-framing scientific questions. 2. Two common barriers to strong inference are examined in detail in this paper: disentangling the effects of different stressors, so that we can confidently in..