“…Using prior knowledge about the system under question, a virtual ecologist (Zurell et al, 2010) approach would use simulation models constructed to incorporate key factors that affect species dynamics. With an appropriate model, simulations can then be run for a variety of scenarios, including changing the number of samples taken per year, altering the number of sites sampled, and sampling for different lengths of time (Rhodes and Jonzen, 2011;Barry et al, 2017;Christie et al, 2019;Weiser et al, 2019;White, 2019). Simulations can also be useful in deciding which streams of data to use (Weiser et al, 2020) or the effect of changing sampling methodology during the course of a study (Southwell et al, 2019).…”