The use of resighting data to estimate the rate of population growth of the snail kite in Florida

Victoria Dreitz, James Nichols, James Hines, Robert Bennetts, Wiley Kitchens and Donald Deangelis

Journal of Applied Statistics, 2002, vol. 29, issue 1-4, 609-623

Abstract: The rate of population growth ( u ) is an important demographic parameter used to assess the viability of a population and to develop management and conservation agendas. We examined the use of resighting data to estimate u for the snail kite population in Florida from 1997-2000. The analyses consisted of (1) a robust design approach that derives an estimate of u from estimates of population size and (2) the Pradel (1996) temporal symmetry (TSM) approach that directly estimates u using an open-population capture-recapture model. Besides resighting data, both approaches required information on the number of unmarked individuals that were sighted during the sampling periods. The point estimates of u differed between the robust design and TSM approaches, but the 95% confidence intervals overlapped substantially. We believe the differences may be the result of sparse data and do not indicate the inappropriateness of either modelling technique. We focused on the results of the robust design because this approach provided estimates for all study years. Variation among these estimates was smaller than levels of variation among ad hoc estimates based on previously reported index statistics. We recommend that u of snail kites be estimated using capture-resighting methods rather than ad hoc counts.

Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02664760120108854 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:japsta:v:29:y:2002:i:1-4:p:609-623

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CJAS20

DOI: 10.1080/02664760120108854

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Applied Statistics is currently edited by Robert Aykroyd

More articles in Journal of Applied Statistics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().