Process-based vs. ad-hoc methods to estimate mortality using carcass surveys data: A review and a note about evidence complacency

Guillaume Péron

Ecological Modelling, 2018, vol. 384, issue C, 111-118

Abstract: To quantify the rate at which wildlife die from anthropogenic sources like wind farms and poisoning, one may look for the carcasses. The number of detected carcasses, or the absence of carcasses, however needs to be corrected for imperfect detection and early removal by scavengers. To perform this correction, there exist more than a dozen “open” variants of the Lincoln-Petersen “closed-population” capture-recapture estimator. These different variants typically yield very different results because they are based on different assumptions that end users do not always consider. I conduct a simulation study highlighting severe biases in Lincoln-Petersen type estimators when their assumptions are violated. Recent attempts to relax these assumptions within the closed-population capture-recapture paradigm involve increasingly complex analysis, yet the resulting modified estimators still apply to restricted settings only. By contrast, there is an abundant literature about flexible, process-based, open-population capture-recapture models and how to fit them to survey data using numerical likelihood optimization. My simulations illustrate the good performance of this approach, in the presence of complex sources of bias, for moderate sample sizes. I review existing guidelines to deal with sparser datasets. As a perspective, I use the example of bird mortality estimation in wind farms to argue that the lack of methodological consensus can set the stage for evidence complacency. Biostatisticians should strive to avoid the proliferation of alternative methods and instead work towards increasingly general and unified frameworks.

Keywords: Sustainability; Population size; Population dynamics; Monitoring; Wind power; Wind turbine; Collision; Incidental take (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380018302266
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:384:y:2018:i:c:p:111-118

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2018.06.021

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Modelling is currently edited by Brian D. Fath

More articles in Ecological Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().