Daily abundance of Dall's sheep peaks during late summer in a seasonal habitat of high-management interest ...

• Main Authors: Deane, Cody E., Flynn, Barrett A., Bruning, Darren L., Breed, Greg A., Jochum, Kim A.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2021
• Subjects: alaska range; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h44j0zpmc; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.h44j0zpmc

Informing conservation and management decisions for habitats frequented by species of high management interest often face the challenge of limited resources for conducting wildlife surveys. When surveys are focused on local areas or sparsely distributed species, it may also be difficult to obtain counts sufficient for implementing abundance models that account for imperfect detection. With replicated aerial surveys collected within a 70.25 km2 portion of the Eastern Alaska Range, Alaska, USA during the summers of 2013–2015, we estimated daily abundance of Dall’s sheep using two different estimation methods: Bayesian N-mixture models and Poisson regression models. We then compared estimates of relative abundance from both model types while paying special attention to the assumption of closure within individual survey units. With abundance estimates obtained from individual survey days, we then estimated the average number of Dall’s sheep within the survey area for the period 1 July–1 October. Daily ewe ... : Metadata documents are uploaded with data ...