Spring spotlight counts provide reliable indices to track changes in population size of mountain-dwelling red deer Cervus elaphus

摘要: Monitoring changes in animal abundance is a central issue conservation biology. Population indices may be valuable support to wildlife managers coarse-scale survey programs, as they normally represent more intuitive and less expensive monitoring tools if compared with absolute estimates. Reliable of relative abundance, however, require validation against some known standards. We used mark-resight estimates investigate the performance derived from spring spotlight surveys track mountain-dwelling population red deer Cervus elaphus within Stelvio National Park, Italian Alps. Every between 2008 2015 we conducted four sessions roadside-counts using spotlights, recording all sightings marked unmarked individuals; zero-truncated Poisson log-normal estimator was applied robust-design fashion return abundance. then two maxim...