Indices to population size have come under increasing criticism in recent years, on the
grounds that indices might not faithfully represent the entire population. Most criticisms …

Pressure to increase food production to meet the demands of a growing human population
can make conservation-motivated recommendations to limit agricultural expansion …

Point-transect sampling is widely used for monitoring trends in abundance of songbirds. It is
conceptualized as a “snapshot” method in which birds are “frozen” at a single location. With …

Inferences based on counts adjusted for detectability represent a marked improvement over
unadjusted counts, which provide no information about true population density and rely on …

Abundance estimation in ecology is usually accomplished by capture–recapture, removal, or
distance sampling methods. These may be hard to implement at large spatial scales. In …

Many factors affect the number of birds detected on point count surveys of breeding
songbirds. The magnitude and importance of these factors are not well understood. We used …

Summary 1 Methods papers play a crucial role in advancing applied ecology. Counting
organisms, in particular, has a rich history of methods development with many key advances …

Oil development in the Bakken shale region has increased rapidly as a result of new
technologies and strong demand for fossil fuel. This region also supports a particularly high …

Agricultural intensification continues being a major threat for biodiversity worldwide. Despite
the incorporation of diverse conservation tools in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) …

Raw count data are often used to estimate bird population densities. However, such data do
not consider detection probability. As an alternative, methods that model detection …