How to monitor a population when there are too few animals to count
by
Jennifer Brown
University of Canterbury

Conservation biologists require accurate and timely estimates of population size - or do they? The traditional method of monitoring animal populations has been to assess relative population size with, e.g., relative indices of abundance. Is this the appropriate index to use when the population is so rare that there are very few individuals?

At very low population levels, i.e., a rare and endangered species, or a residual pest population, indices based on the proportion of the area occupied, rather than counts of the number of individuals may be more informative.

Here I review some options for low density population monitoring, and highlight some statistical challenges in this very applied area of statistics.

Date received: August 19, 2001

Copyright © 2001 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cahg-16.