Estimation of population size in closed animal populations from mark-resighting surveys

摘要

The problem of estimating the size of a closed population based on the results of a certain type of mark-resighting sampling design is considered. The sampling design is similar to the commonly used multiple capture–recapture design. However, with some animal populations this procedure is more economical and easier to use. Sampling is done by first tagging a number of randomly selected animals with visible markers and later randomly sighting them on several occasions and counting the number of tagged animals. This type of sampling procedure is being used in several wildlife population monitoring studies. Some approximate statistical inference procedures which are based on the binomial approximation are available in the literature. Exact statistical inference involves dealing with the hypergeometric distribution. In this paper, classical and Bayesian inference procedures related to the exact sampling distribution and several other approximate procedures are given. Applications of these procedures for a real data set and for a couple of simulated data sets are provided. A limited simulation study is also given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed procedure.