Wildlife Counting Techniques

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Wildlife Counting Techniques

• Get a piece of paper
• Count the number of individuals you see in the
  following three slides
• Write the number down
• You will be given 5 seconds for each slide
• Are you ready?

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Counting Wildlife

• How many did you get in the first slide?
• Second slide?
• Third slide?
• Did you count each individual?
• Why was the third slide hardest?
• Counting by groups is much more efficient.

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Counting by groups is much more efficient. In
this example, 5 individuals were grouped.
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Approximately how many individuals are in each of
these groups?
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Counting Exercise 2

• Try counting by groups of 5 or 10 on the next
  three slides
• Compare numbers when finished
• Remember, you are flying over these individuals,
  and dont have much time so you will only get 5
  seconds again.

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Counting Exercise

• Compare your results with the class. How many
  did each student get? What was the actual number
  of individuals.
• With experience, you can learn to accurately
  count groups of 10, 20, 100, or 1,000
• It also helps to count groups of various sizes
  (i.e. a group of 250 could be counted as two
  groups of 100 and one group of 50)
• It is not a precise science!

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Counting Errors

• Counting Errors occur
• May over-count, may under-count
• Hopefully these errors cancel out
• Studies show that people tend to undercount,
  introducing bias
• Undercounting bias tends to increase with larger
  groups
• Counting bias is different for everyone!

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Aerial Survey Techniques

• Aerial Transect Sampling
• An aircraft flies at a fixed height and speed
  from side-to-side across the study area while
  observers count individuals in a strip of land
  either side of the plane. Each aerial transect is
  considered to be a long thin quadrat which spans
  the study area.

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Set up of the Aircraft
Source unknown.
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Set up for Activity Aerial Survey