Abstract
Hunters in Europe gather non-survey game species population estimates to inform wildlife management, however, the quality of such estimates remains unclear. We compared estimates of game density, realized annual intrinsic growth rates, and period mean growth rates between hunter obtained data and data obtained by targeted survey methods for four species in Poland from 1960 to 2014. Raw hunter estimates were strongly positively correlated to spotlight counts of red fox (18 years of monitoring), strip counts of brown hare (21 years) and grey partridge (25 years), male call counts of partridge (24 years), and complete counts of roe deer (49 years), and not related to spotlight counts of brown hare (15 years). Realized annual intrinsic growth rates derived from hunter estimates were strongly positively related to annual intrinsic growth rates derived from strip counts of grey partridge and complete counts of roe deer, but only weakly or not related to strip counts of brown hare, spotlight counts of red fox and brown hare, and male call counts of grey partridge. The period length at which the period mean growth rates derived from hunter estimates and estimates from other methods were strongly correlated was largely variable among methods and species. In the roe deer, correlation between these variables was strong across all years, while in smaller game species the period mean growth rates based on hunter estimates and other methods had the strongest association in period lengths of 6 to 11 years. We conclude that raw hunter estimates convey largely similar information to that provided by other targeted survey methods. Hunter estimates provide a source of population data for both the retrospective and prospective analysis of game population development when more robust estimates are unavailable.
Highlights
Hunting is a vital tool which can be used in the management of the game species populations [1,2,3,4,5,6]
For rt derived from strip counts and rt derived from hunter estimates there was positive but weak correlation for brown hare (r = 0.28, p = 0.23, n = 20; Fig 3C), and strongly positive for the grey partridge (r = 0.73, < 0.001, n = 24; (Fig 3D)
There was no correlation between rt derived from male call counts and rt derived from hunter estimates for partridge (r = -0.21, p = 0.35, n = 23; Fig 3E)
Summary
Hunting is a vital tool which can be used in the management of the game species populations [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Methods, and models have become available for estimation of animal abundance and density including distance sampling or capture-mark-recapture/resight; powerful tools allowing for modeling of detection probabilities and greatly improving the precision of estimates [13]. These methods have only rarely been adopted by hunting and game management authorities at the expense of much simpler approaches, such as hunter-based population estimates, presumably because of the inherited need for intensive expert-level manpower, high statistical competence for data analysis, and overall higher financial costs [14,15]. This may have fundamental consequences for game populations as it is rather uncommon that hunting authorities define census methods to be used by hunters for monitoring game abundance [7,16,17,18,19,20] nor supervise or coordinate their implementation, applied census methods may vary greatly between hunting areas [18]
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