Date: August 29, 2018
Source: American Ornithological Society Publications
Office
Summary:
Knowing
approximately how many individuals of a certain species are out there is
important for bird conservation efforts, but raw data from bird surveys tends
to underestimate bird abundance. The researchers behind a new paper
from The Condor: Ornithological Applications tested a new statistical
method to adjust for this and confirmed several mathematical tweaks that can
produce better population estimates for species of conservation concern.
The
University of Alberta's Péter Sólymos and his colleagues tested a type of
mathematical model called a "removal model" using bird count data for
152 species from the Boreal Avian Modelling Project, or BAM, which covers a
vast area of Canada, Alaska, and the northeastern U.S. They found that
incorporating variation in birds' singing behavior improved models' accuracy --
how likely birds are to sing changes over the course of the day and the year,
affecting how easy they are to detect. Extending the length of individual bird
counts from three or five minutes to ten minutes was also beneficial.
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