UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences Quantitative Seminar
Kevin See
UW Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management
The effects of replicated observations on population viability analysis
Abstract
Population viability analysis (PVA) is often concerned with predicting the probability of extinction for a particular species over a given time horizon. One criticism of PVA has been that the uncertainty around the probability of extinction is often large, rendering it difficult for managers to base decisions on it. Recently, state-space models have shown promise in shrinking that uncertainty by separating process and non-process variance estimates. I investigated the effect of including data from an additional site on the estimates of the probability of extinction and whether those estimates lead to a more accurate characterization of the uncertainty around such extinction predictions. The results have implications for managers of threatened species in terms of whether data from additional sites might be worth collecting or including in a PVA.
