Using Radio-Telemetry for Mark-Recapture Studies with Edge Effects

Abstract

(1) Radio-telemetry provides a technique for estimating population abundance of species that move on and off a study plot during a survey period. (2) Monte Carlo simulations indicate that either a bias-corrected version of the ''mean Petersen'' or a Petersen estimate based on the means of the observations may be suitable for estimating abundance from radio-telemetry data. (3) The proposed bias correction may make it possible to obtain useful abundance estimates for very small populations, given sufficiently high probabilities of marking and recapture.