Assessing the performance of index calibration survey methods to monitor populations of wide-ranging low-density carnivores

Within the R code a user has to set the following parameters: The chosen site (either "Hwhange" or "Kafue"), The survey intensity, which is the percentage of road network included in transects, in the manuscript we use 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100. The length of transects (in meters), in the manuscript we use 10,000 (for the first half of transects per set) and 5,000 (for the second half of transects per set). The coordinate reference system (crs), both our study area were '32735' The spacing of points. This determines how the road network will be broken up. The number entered represents the number of meters between each point. We used 50, which means that for the whole road network (which are lines) a point is created every 50m. A smaller number would mean more precision, but also (much) more time needed to create transects. The combination of intensity, lengths of transects and spacing of points determines how many transects will be generated per transect set and how many points there are per transect. I advise to start with a low intensity and short transects to get an idea how fast (or slow) things go. During transect creations the code will print every 10th point of a transect to show how it's progressing. One could consider overriding the calculating of number of needed transects by adding setting 'transectNR' manually. The minimal distance, in meters. This determines the distance which is used as a treshold if crossing points should be kept or not. If points are less distance from each other than specified only one will be kept. The default value we used is 1,000 meters. Road buffer distance, this places a small buffer around the roads to ensure that no crossings are missed because of accuracy issues in the location of roads or locations of lions. The default value is set to 25 meters. The first and last transect sets. These are used to keep track of the number of transect sets created. Creating random transect sets can take considerable time, thus generated transects are saved as shapefiles so they can be re-used later. I advise with only generating a few transect sets first to determine how fast things go on your machine. The user will also have to create a folder called 'results' within their working directory. This folder will be used to store the output (shapefiles and image files of transects, image files of examples of crossings, csv files with transect set, transect number and transect lengths (in meters) and csv files with the coordinates of an intersection between transect and lion trajectory, DOY, pride, pride size, date, transect set, transect number, length of transect, id and simulation number ('run'). Separate shapefile for surveys with 100% intensity are used, these are the same road networks, but pre-processed in QGIS (see above).