SUBSAMPLING WITH LINE TRANSECTS FOR ESTIMATION OF ANIMAL ABUNDANCE

✍ Scribed by A. L. JENSEN

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 392 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1180-4009
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-095x(199605)7:3<283::aid-env212>3.0.co;2-c

✦ Synopsis

Estimation of abundance is critical to conservation biology and wildlife management, and the line transect method is widely applied for estimation of abundance because it is simple, economical, and relatively precise. Coupling line transect sampling with subsampling methods of survey research enables application of the extensive work done in survey sampling to the line transect method. Line transect sampling can be treated as subsampling where the area inhabited by the population is separated into non-overlapping quadrates or primary sampling units, PSUs, and then randomly selected PSUs are subsampled with line transects. If the number of PSUs is large, subsampling estimators indicate that the variation among transects is the major source of variation, and the variance of the estimate of abundance can be estimated using only variation among PSUs which does not depend on an assumed spatial distribution of animals. For subsampling, a large number of short line transects is preferable to a few long line transects because most variation is among transects.