Dc. Bowden et Rc. Kufeld, GENERALIZED MARK-SIGHT POPULATION-SIZE ESTIMATION APPLIED TO COLORADOMOOSE, The Journal of wildlife management, 59(4), 1995, pp. 840-851
A new procedure for constructing confidence interval estimates of popu
lation size in mark-sight experiments is presented. The method of sele
cting animals for marking must be equivalent to a simple random sample
without replacement. Marked animals are required to be individually i
dentifiable. The number of times animals are sighted must be independe
nt of their mark status. The sighting process does not need to be comp
osed of independent sighting trials or even decomposable into separate
trials. Sighting probabilities can vary among individuals and can dep
end on such factors as group size and vegetational cover. Other method
s of constructing confidence intervals in mark-sight experiments given
these latter conditions have failed to achieve their stated nominal c
onfidence level. Our confidence interval procedures are shown by simul
ation to have actual confidence levels close to nominal under conditio
ns encountered in an application to a Colorado moose (Alces alces shir
asi) population. For this population with 29 radio-collared moose and
5 helicopter sighting nights, the 90% confidence interval for the moos
e population size on the 1,400-km(2) area was 382-505.