ABSTRACT

When there is an environmental problem and the stakeholders desire to solve it using data, statistical inference is a tool that can be used for this purpose. Ideally, the stakeholders would like to measure the entire population that contains the problem of interest. In that case, everything the stakeholders want to know about the population is measured and the conclusions about it involve no uncertainty. However, such measurement of the entire population is often impractical or impossible, largely because of the high costs involved in such an approach. An alternative to this approach is to take a sample of this population and infer from the sample data necessary information about the population.