Leveraging the strengths of citizen science and structured surveys to achieve scalable inference on population size

Population size is a key metric for management and policy decisions, yet wildlife monitoring programs are often limited by the spatial and temporal scope of surveys. In these cases, citizen science data may provide complementary information at higher resolution and greater extent.
We present a case study demonstrating how data from the eBird citizen science program can be combined with regional monitoring efforts by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to produce high-resolution estimates of golden eagle abundance. We developed a model that uses aerial survey data from the western United States to calibrate high-resolution annual estimates of relative abundance from eBird. Using this model, we compared regional population size estimates based on the calibrated eBird information to those based on aerial survey data alone.
Population size estimates based on the calibrated eBird information had strong correspondence to estimates from aerial survey data in two out of four regions, and popula...