Plethodontid salamanders are diverse and widely distributed taxa and play critical roles in ecosystem processes. Due to salamander use of structurally complex habitats, and because only a portion of a population is available for sampling, evaluation of sampling designs and estimators is critical to provide strong inference about Plethodontid ecology...
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Josh Johnson5, Summer Peerman5, Ben Brintz6, Michael Rochelle5
1 Weyerhaeuser, Federal Way, Washington
Plethodontid salamanders are diverse and widely distributed taxa and play critical roles in ecosystem processes. Due to salamander use of structurally complex habitats, and because only a portion of a population is available for sampling, evaluation of sampling designs and estimators is critical to provide strong inference about Plethodontid ecology...
N-mixture models provide a structure for making inference about a local population size while accounting for imperfect detection. Using a binomial likelihood, they assume prior distributions on the size parameters and then integrate those parameters out of the full likelihood. For large population sizes, the established frequentist methods have exhibited...