IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| MacKenzie, D.I. | |
| What are the issues with presence-absence data for wildlife managers? | |
| 2005 Journal of Wildlife Management (69): 849-860 | |
Presence-absence data can be useful to wildlife managers in a wide variety of contexts, from monitoring population at large spatial scales to identifying habitats that are of high value to specific species of conservation concern. However, a key issue is that a species may be declared "absent" from a landscape unit simply as a result of not detecting the species using the prescribed sampling methods. The effects of this imperfect is that parameter estimates will be biased, and any modeling of the data provides a description of surveyors' ability to find the species on the landscape, not where the species is on the landscape. The reliability of so-called "presence-absence" data for marking management decision and valid scientific conclusion could therefore be questioned. However, after collecting appropriate data (i.e., repeated surveys of landscape units within a relatively short timeframe), recently development models can be used to obtain unbiased parameter estimates. Here I provide a no technical overview of the issues that pertain to wildlife studies or monitoring programs that seek to make reliable inference about the presence or absence of a target species. |
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