Abstract
The survey of plant and animal populations is central to undertaking field ecology. However, detection is imperfect, so the absence of a species cannot be determined with certainty. Methods developed to account for imperfect detectability during surveys do not yet account for stochastic variation in detectability over time or space. When each survey entails a fixed cost that is not spent searching (e.g., time required to travel to the site), stochastic detection rates result in a trade-off between the number of surveys and the length of each survey when surveying a single site. We present a model that addresses this trade-off and use it to determine the number of surveys that: 1) maximizes the expected probability of detection over the entire survey period; and 2) is most likely to achieve a minimally-acceptable probability of detection. We illustrate the applicability of our approach using three practical examples (minimum survey effort protocols, number of frog surveys per season, and number of quadrats per site to detect a plant species) and test our model's predictions using data from experimental plant surveys. We find that when maximizing the expected probability of detection, the optimal survey design is most sensitive to the coefficient of variation in the rate of detection and the ratio of the search budget to the travel cost. When maximizing the likelihood of achieving a particular probability of detection, the optimal survey design is most sensitive to the required probability of detection, the expected number of detections if the budget were spent only on searching, and the expected number of detections that are missed due to travel costs. We find that accounting for stochasticity in detection rates is likely to be particularly important for designing surveys when detection rates are low. Our model provides a framework to do this.
Highlights
The probability of detecting a species has important implications for ecological surveys of plants and animals
We developed a model of detection at a single site that accounts for stochastic variation in the detection rate between visits
When the objective was to maximize the expected probability of detection, variability in the detection rate among surveys, expressed as the coefficient of variation, was important
Summary
The probability of detecting a species has important implications for ecological surveys of plants and animals. The absence of a species cannot be determined with certainty [4, 5] This needs to be accounted for in order to, for example, derive unbiased estimates of abundance [6, 7]. Imperfect detectability has important consequences in ecology, including for re-visitation studies [8], demographic studies [9], environmental impact assessments [10], species occupancy studies [11, 12] and species distribution models [13]. Several methods have been developed to estimate and account for imperfect detection during ecological surveys [10, 26, 27]. To the best of our knowledge, these methods do not account for stochastic variation in detectability, despite such variation being well documented and potentially important [28]
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