Using simulation to evaluate wildlife survey designs: polar bears and seals in the Chukchi Sea

Logistically demanding and expensive wildlife surveys should ideally yield defensible estimates. Here, we show how simulation can be used to evaluate alternative survey designs for estimating wildlife abundance. Specifically, we evaluate the potential of instrument-based aerial surveys (combining in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Royal Society open science 2016-01, Vol.3 (1), p.150561-150561
Main Authors: Conn, Paul B., Moreland, Erin E., Regehr, Eric V., Richmond, Erin L., Cameron, Michael F., Boveng, Peter L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aerial Survey
Animal Abundance
Biology (whole Organism)
Ice-Associated Seal
Polar Bear
Species Distribution Model
Survey Design
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Summary:Logistically demanding and expensive wildlife surveys should ideally yield defensible estimates. Here, we show how simulation can be used to evaluate alternative survey designs for estimating wildlife abundance. Specifically, we evaluate the potential of instrument-based aerial surveys (combining infrared imagery with high-resolution digital photography to detect and identify species) for estimating abundance of polar bears and seals in the Chukchi Sea. We investigate the consequences of different levels of survey effort, flight track allocation and model configuration on bias and precision of abundance estimators. For bearded seals (0.07 animals km−2) and ringed seals (1.29 animals km−2), we find that eight flights traversing ≈7840 km are sufficient to achieve target precision levels (coefficient of variation (CV)
ISSN:2054-5703
2054-5703
DOI:10.1098/rsos.150561