Bayesian Methods for Estimating Animal Abundance at Large Spatial Scales Using Data from Multiple Sources

Estimating animal distributions and abundances over large regions is of primary interest in ecology and conservation. Specifically, integrating data from reliable but expensive surveys conducted at smaller scales with cost-effective but less reliable data generated from surveys at wider scales remai...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of agricultural, biological, and environmental statistics biological, and environmental statistics, 2017-06, Vol.22 (2), p.111-139
Main Authors: Dey, Soumen, Delampady, Mohan, Parameshwaran, Ravishankar, Kumar, N. Samba, Srivathsa, Arjun, Karanth, K. Ullas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abundance
Agriculture
Bayesian analysis
Biostatistics
Capture-recapture studies
Ecological monitoring
Environmental statistics
Estimates
Estimation
Health Sciences
Mathematics and Statistics
Medicine
Methods
Monitoring/Environmental Analysis
Nature reserves
Regression coefficients
Smoothing
Spatial distribution
Statistics
Statistics for Life Sciences
Surveys
Tigers
Wildlife conservation
Wildlife habitats
Wildlife refuges
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Summary:Estimating animal distributions and abundances over large regions is of primary interest in ecology and conservation. Specifically, integrating data from reliable but expensive surveys conducted at smaller scales with cost-effective but less reliable data generated from surveys at wider scales remains a central challenge in statistical ecology. In this study, we use a Bayesian smoothing technique based on a conditionally autoregressive (CAR) prior distribution and Bayesian regression to address this problem. We illustrate the utility of our proposed methodology by integrating (i) abundance estimates of tigers in wildlife reserves from intensive photographic capture-recapture methods, and (ii) estimates of tiger habitat occupancy from indirect sign surveys, conducted over a wider region. We also investigate whether the random effects which represent the spatial association due to the CAR structure have any confounding effect on the fixed effects of the regression coefficients.
ISSN:1085-7117
1537-2693
DOI:10.1007/s13253-017-0276-7