Agent Skills
› brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills
› conbio-study-design
conbio-study-design
GitHub用于辩护保护生物学论文的研究设计，涵盖生态采样、准实验设计、建模及社会维度方法。通过应对检测偏差、伪重复等挑战，强化设计的可信度与结论的转移性，不编写代码。
Trigger Scenarios
在野外工作或分析前确定采样或模型设计
审稿人质疑检测率、复制性、空间自相关或因果推断
设计干预措施评估或综合研究方案
论证研究设计如何排除文献定位中的竞争性解释
Install
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill conbio-study-design -g -y
SKILL.md
Frontmatter
{
"name": "conbio-study-design",
"description": "Use when defending the study design of a Conservation Biology manuscript — ecological sampling and inference (detection, spatial structure, pseudoreplication), comparative\/observational and quasi-experimental designs (BACI), modeling and synthesis design, and human-dimensions methods. The journal judges each appropriate method on its own terms. Strengthens the design; it does not write code."
}
Study Design (conbio-study-design)
Conservation Biology accepts many methodologies but is demanding about each. The design must
credibly connect the conservation question (conbio-topic-selection) to evidence that supports a
transferable, decision-relevant conclusion. This skill is mode-aware: pick the section that matches
your work and defend it against the strongest alternative explanation.
When to trigger
- Specifying sampling, comparison, or modeling design before fieldwork or analysis
- A reviewer questioned detection, replication, spatial autocorrelation, or causal claims
- Designing an intervention/management evaluation or a synthesis protocol
- Justifying why your design adjudicates the rival account from
conbio-literature-positioning
Field & observational ecology
- Account for detection. Imperfect detection biases counts — use occupancy, distance sampling, or capture-recapture rather than raw indices when detection varies.
- Replication and scale. Avoid pseudoreplication; define the independent unit; match the spatial and temporal scale of sampling to the inference. State the sampling frame.
- Spatial structure. Address spatial autocorrelation and spatial bias (sampling effort, access).
Comparative / quasi-experimental (intervention evaluation)
- Use BACI / before-after-control-impact, control-impact, or matched designs to attribute change to a conservation action rather than to background trend.
- Counterfactual thinking. What would have happened without the protected area / policy / harvest rule? Matching, difference-in-differences, or synthetic controls where appropriate.
- State confounders (accessibility, prior condition) and how the design or analysis handles them.
Modeling & synthesis
- SDM / niche / population models: justify predictors, address sampling bias and collinearity, validate out-of-sample; state transferability limits before projecting.
- Systematic review / meta-analysis: follow PRISMA / CEE protocols; preregister where possible; document search, screening, and effect-size extraction.
Human dimensions / social science
- Match the method (surveys, interviews, choice experiments) to the question; report sampling, ethics, consent, and how respondent identity and sensitive data are protected.
The adjudication test (journal-specific)
For the single strongest rival explanation, write one sentence: "If the rival were true rather than my conclusion, the data would look like ___; instead they look like ___." If you cannot, the design does not yet support a transferable conservation claim.
Anti-patterns
- Raw counts treated as abundance with no detection model
- Pseudoreplication; inference at a scale the sampling cannot support
- "Effect of the intervention" with no counterfactual or control
- SDM/model projected far outside its training range with no transferability caveat
- A design that cannot distinguish your conclusion from the leading alternative
Operating pass for Conservation Biology
Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the species/system threat, conservation decision, and uncertainty relevant to action; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: conservation-science reviewers who ask whether evidence changes biodiversity, management, or policy action.
- Do the pass: Return a claim-evidence-risk ledger rather than a prose-only diagnosis; every recommendation must point to a manuscript location or missing artifact.
- Return a ledger: give
claim / evidence / risk / manuscript locationrows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue. - Sibling guard: compare against Biological Conservation for applied conservation breadth, Global Change Biology for climate/ecosystem process, Ecology Letters for theory-forward ecology; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
- Submission-ready gate: do not give final advice until the pack's
resources/official-source-map.mdhas been checked for upload-week rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.
Output format
【Mode】field-ecology / quasi-experimental / modeling-synthesis / human-dimensions
【Question / estimand】what is being measured or attributed
【Key assumption(s)】detection, scale, counterfactual, transferability — how each is defended
【Rival ruled out】the adjudication sentence
【Robustness/sensitivity】planned checks
【Next】conbio-data-analysis
Supplementary resources
../../resources/external_tools.md— occupancy, capture-recapture, SDM, BACI, and synthesis tooling../../resources/official-source-map.md— reviewer expectations and scope
Version History
- 1839142 Current 2026-07-05 12:47
