UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences Quantitative Seminar

Beth Gardner

UW, SEFS

If a bird flies by, but you didn't observe it, does it exist?

Abstract

Monitoring of sea bird species presents a series of challenges including imperfect detection, highly skewed counts, large aggregations, and rare and elusive species. With proposed offshore wind energy development in the Western North Atlantic, there is a need to understand sea bird distributions and abundances. Distance sampling is a popular method to survey both terrestrial and marine wildlife species amenable to direct observation. In distance sampling, the probability of detecting an individual is assumed to decrease with increasing distance from the observer. This allows estimation of abundance and density while accounting for observation bias, and is commonly used to monitor marine species (including sea birds). I will discuss some recent developments in distance sampling models and some new approaches my lab group is working on to integrate multiple data sources and to deal with extreme counts.