Was it there? Dealing with imperfect detection for species presence/absence data

Publication Type:

Journal Article

Authors:

Source:

Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics, Australian Statistical Publishing Association Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty. Ltd., Volume 47, Issue 1, p.65–74 (2005)

Call Number:

A05MAC03IDUS

Keywords:

Ambystoma tigrinum, monitoring, presence-absence, species occurrence, study design, tiger salamander

Abstract:

Species presence/absence surveys are commonly used in monitoring programs, metapopulation studies, and habitat modelling, yet they can never be used to confirm that a species is absent from a location. Was the species there but not detected, or was the species genuinely absent? Not accounting for imperfect detection of the species leads to misleading conclusions about the status of the population under study. Here some recent modelling developments are reviewed that explicitly allow for the detection process, enabling unbiased estimation of occupancy, colonization, and local extinction probabilities. The methods are illustrated with a simple analysis of presence/absence data collected on larvae and metamorphs of tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum) in 2000 and 2001 from Minnesota farm ponds and show that misleading conclusions can result from naive analyses that do not explicitly account for imperfect detection.