Graham Upton - Measuring Abundance: Methods for the Estimation of Population Size and Species Richness

Measuring Abundance

Methods for the Estimation of Population Size and Species Richness

Graham J. G. Upton

DATA IN THE WILD SERIES

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Measuring Abundance:
Methods for the Estimation of Population Size and Species Richness

ISBN 978-1-78427-232-6 (Hbk)
ISBN 978-1-78427-231-9 (Pbk)
ISBN 978-1-78427-233-3 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-78427-234-0 (ePDF)

Copyright 2020 Graham J. G. Upton

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. Apart from short excerpts for use in research or for reviews, no part of this document may be printed or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, now known or hereafter invented or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover image: Monarch butterfly ( Danaus plexippus) migration (iStock/Jodi Jacobson)

This book aims to bring together, for the first time, descriptions of all the most widely used methods for assessing the sizes of populations of living organisms. The papers referenced come from more than 100 different journals that cover many disciplines. However, both for their ubiquity, and for the number of papers cited, two journals stand out: Biometricsand Ecology. Together they indicate that the subject of this book might be termed quantitative ecology.

Wherever possible, examples are used to illustrate the method being described. The methods selected are either those currently used or the earlier methods that underlay them. In a few cases I have suggested adjustments that appear to improve accuracy.

The techniques and problems associated with the measurement of plant cover, are rather different from those used for assessing the amount of timber in a forest, and are very different from those used for counting birds or fishes. My hope is that specialists working with one type of organism, may chance across a procedure, currently used in a different context, that they can adapt to their own purposes.

The descriptions of the many methods contained in this book are necessarily brief, and there will always be much more that could be written; to cover that deficiency there is a recommended reading section at the back, giving details of specialist books that constitute essential reading for the methods described.

Computer programmes are referenced where appropriate. My preference is for programmes based on R (because they are free), but reference is also made to other widely used programmes. Methods for the assessment of the size of mobile populations are particularly complex. As an example, the online manual for the programme MARK(which deals with capture-recapture data) has more than 1000 pages.

Following a brief synopsis of relevant statistical methods in addresses methods for stationary items. Questions addressed here include: the numbers of standing or fallen trees in a forest; the amount of timber in a forest; the amount of plant cover in a field, and the amount of coral in a coral bank. The methods in this section are relatively easy to describe and use.

It is no surprise that assessing the numbers of moving objects is much more challenging, both to describe, and to carry out. includes examples of the estimation of the numbers of reptiles (skinks), mammals (grizzly bears, marmots), amphibians (frogs), fish (darters), crustaceans (lobsters, crabs), and birds (ovenbirds). Most examples include computer code, though the analyses here would constitute no more than the preliminary stages of a proper analysis of the data.

is concerned with the many aspects of species richness and diversity.

There are a few sections marked with an asterisk. These are sections that may be read by the curious, but can be ignored without affecting the understanding of the remainder.

About 40 years ago I was co-author (with Bernard Fingleton) of the two volumes of Spatial Data Analysis by Example.