Assessing the value of monitoring to biological inference and expected management performance for a European goose population ...

• Main Authors: Johnson, Fred, Madsen, Jesper, Clausen, Kevin, Frederiksen, Morten, Jensen, Gitte
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2022
• Subjects: adaptive management; harvest; integrated population model; Monitoring; Optimization; pink-footed goose; Stochastic dynamic programming; value of information; FOS Natural sciences; Christensen; Norway; Anser brachyrhynchus; Pink-footed Goose
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j3tx95xjg; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.j3tx95xjg

1. Informed conservation and management of wildlife require sufficient monitoring to understand population dynamics and to direct conservation actions. Because resources available for monitoring are limited, conservation practitioners must strive to make monitoring as cost-effective as possible. 2. Our focus was on assessing the value of monitoring to the adaptive harvest management (AHM) program for pink-footed geese (Anser brachyrhynchus). We conducted a retrospective analysis to assess the costs and benefits of a capture-mark-resight (CMR) program, a productivity survey, and biannual population censuses. Using all available data, we fit an integrated population model (IPM) and assumed that inference derived from it represented the benchmark against which reduced monitoring was to be judged. We then fit IPMs to reduced sets of monitoring data and compared their estimates of demographic parameters and expected management performance against the benchmark IPM. 3. Costs and the precision and accuracy of key ... : Population counts conducted in spring and autumn – Internationally coordinated population counts of pink-footed geese have been performed annually since 1990 in Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands in late October or early November (hereafter referred to as the November count) (Madsen et al., 1999). Over time, the population has expanded its distribution and the spatial coverage of the count has repeatedly been extended to capture new sites occupied by geese (Madsen, Christensen, Balsby, & Tombre, 2015). Since 2005, the population has also been counted in Norway, and since 2016 in Sweden. Because of increasing challenges in monitoring the autumn population, an additional count was introduced in May in 2010, which includes Norway, Denmark, Sweden and, since 2016, Finland. The known sites are covered by a network of trained observers who coordinate the coverage. The May census costs €5,327 per year for academic staff salary and travel costs of volunteers. The cost of the November census is similar, ...