Concepts: Integrating population survey data from different spatial scales, sampling methods, and species

Abstract

Conservationists and managers are continually under pressure from the public, the media, and political policy makers to provide “tiger numbers,” not just for protected reserves, but also for large spatial scales, including landscapes, regions, states, nations, and even globally. Estimating the abundance of tigers within relatively small areas (e.g., protected reserves) is becoming increasingly tractable (see Chaps. 9 and 10), but doing so for larger spatial scales still presents a formidable challenge. Those who seek “tiger numbers” are often not satisfied by estimates of tiger occupancy alone, regardless of the reliability of the estimates (see Chaps. 4 and 5). As a result, wherever tiger conservation efforts are underway, either substantially or nominally, scientists and managers are frequently asked to provide putative large-scale tiger numbers based either on a total count or on an extrapolation of some sort (see Chaps. 1 and 2).