Estimating abundance of an open population with an N-mixture model using auxiliary data on animal movements

Accurate assessment of abundance forms a central challenge in population ecology and wildlife management. Many statistical techniques have been developed to estimate population sizes because populations change over time and space, and to correct for the bias resulting from animals that are present in a study area but not observed. The mobility of individuals makes it difficult to design sampling procedures that account for movement into and out of areas with fixed jurisdictional boundaries. Aerial surveys are the gold standard used to obtain data of large mobile species in geographic regions with harsh terrain, but these surveys can be prohibitively expensive and dangerous. Estimating abundance with ground based census methods have practical advantages, but it can be difficult to simultaneously account for temporary emigration and observer error to avoid biased results. Contemporary research in population ecology increasingly relies on telemetry observations of the states and locations ...

种群丰度的精准评估是种群生态学与野生动物管理领域的核心难题之一。由于种群随时间与空间动态变化，且存在研究区域内存在但未被观测到的动物所导致的观测偏差，学界已开发出诸多统计方法用于估算种群规模并校正此类偏差。个体的移动性使得难以设计出能够兼顾个体进出固定管辖区域的抽样方案。航空调查是在地形恶劣的地理区域获取大型移动物种种群数据的金标准（gold standard），但此类调查往往成本高昂且兼具安全风险。基于地面普查法估算种群丰度虽具备实际应用优势，但难以同时兼顾临时迁出与观测者误差，易得到有偏的估算结果。当前种群生态学领域的研究愈发依赖于对个体状态与位置的遥测（telemetry）观测……