Niamh Mimnagh - Estimating abundance in animal communities: A multi-species N-Mixture model

10th November - Seminar Series Accurate estimation of animal abundance is of great importance in areas such as conservation and wildlife management. The univariate N-Mixture model (Royle, 2004) was developed with the aim of estimating animal abundance from simple count data, which is inexpensive to collect, but prone to imperfect detection. In this presentation, I will examine this existing methodology, and how the univariate N-mixture model can be extended in order to model populations of multiple species simultaneously. This permits us to estimate both species’ abundances and inter-species correlations, which allows us to begin to make inferences as to the relationships that these species have with one another. I will then examine further extensions to this model, which allow us to examine data collected over several years, and data in which a large proportion of the counts are zero. I’ll finish by looking at simulation studies, which were run to examine the accuracy of model estimates, and an implementation on case study data collected as part of the North American Breeding Bird survey. Read the corresponding paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14966