Chapter 12 - Estimation of Abundance from Counts in Metapopulation Designs Using the Binomial Mixture Model

Abstract

The last two chapters of this book deal with the modeling of abundance and occurrence in a metapopulation design. We show how a sort of nonstandard generalized linear mixed model (GLMM), a logistic regression with Poisson or with Bernoulli random effects, can be used to estimate population size or species occurrence in systems of spatial replicate populations. At least some of them must be surveyed more than once during a short period, that is, replication is required in space and in time. Short means that the dynamics of the collection of populations (extinction, colonization, or emigration and immigration, as well as survival and recruitment) must be negligible over the time period over which replicate surveys are conducted. We call studies with such systems of spatial replicate populations with temporally replicated samples a metapopulation design ( Hanski, 1998 ).