estimating the abundance of mouse populations of known size.pdfVIP

Ecological Applications, 16(2), 2006, pp. 829–837 2006 by the Ecological Society of America ESTIMATING THE ABUNDANCE OF MOUSE POPULATIONS OF KNOWN SIZE: PROMISES AND PITFALLS OF NEW METHODS PAUL B. CONN,1,4 ANTHONY D. ARTHUR,2 LARISSA L. BAILEY,3 AND GRANT R. SINGLETON2 1Department of Fishery and Wildlife Biology, Colorado State University, Wagar Hall, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523 USA 2 CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, GPO Box 284, Canberra ACT 2601 Australia 3 USGS Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, North Carolina State University and Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, 12100 Beech Forest Road, Laurel, Maryland 20708-4017 USA Abstract. Knowledge of animal abundance is fundamental to many ecological studies. Frequently, researchers cannot determine true abundance, and so must estimate it using a method such as mark–recapture or distance sampling. Recent advances in abundance estimation allow one to model heterogeneity with individual covariates or mixture distributions and to derive multimodel abundance estimators that explicitly address uncertainty about which model parameterization best represents truth. Further, it is possible to borrow information on detection probability across several populations when data are sparse. While promising, these methods have not been evaluated using mark–recapture data from populations of known abundance, and thus far have largely been overlooked by ecologists. In this paper, we explored the utility of newly developed mark–recapture methods for estimating the abundance of 12 captive populations of wild house mice (Mus musculus). We found that mark–re