Plan your survey schedule

When planning your survey schedule, you need to decide how many times you will sample in one year, and when you will be sampling. Your survey schedule needs to be planned in such a way that you can answer your research questions in the end. For this reason, it is important to look to your research questions for guidance as to when and how often you should be doing your beach surveys.

Examples of things that may influence your sampling schedule are:

1. The season,
2. weather conditions,
3. ocean tides,
4. public events,
5. access to the beach.

Each of these are discussed in more detail in the pages that follow.
You can go through them all, or look at those which are relevant to your site and surveys.