North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) mobile acoustic transect surveys standard operating procedure 3—Conducting mobile transect surveys

Methods for estimating detection efficiency and tracking acoustic tags with mobile transect surveys.

Mobile transect surveys were conducted for 5 years in a deep fjord looking for weak acoustic tags, most of which were in dead fishes lying on the seabed. Detection efficiencies were quantified because inferences about fish presence were made from tag detection data but a considerable proportion of tags were not detected. Methods for assessing transect widths using cumulative probabilities of me...

Line transect methods for plant surveys.

Interest in surveys for monitoring plant abundance is increasing, due in part to the need to quantify the rate of loss of biodiversity. Line transect sampling offers an efficient way to monitor many species. However, the method does not work well in some circumstances, for example on small survey plots, when the plant species has a strongly aggregated distribution, or when plants that are on th...

Parametric models for line transect surveys

With data from line transeot surveys, the pattern of distances at which animals are detected provides the information for estimating the area which the observer effectively surveys. This paper suggests a parametric structure for the problem wherein this area is characterized by an effective half-width parameter which appears as a scale parameter in the distributions of detection distances. Seve...

Point Transect Surveys for Songbirds: Robust Methodologies

Seabirds At-Sea Surveys: The Line-Transect Method Outperforms the Point-Transect Alternative

Methods: We tested whether modeling of detection probabilities, and density estimates with their coefficients of variation obtained from the point-transect method provided more robust and precise results than the more commonly used line-transect method. We subdivided our data by species groups (alcids, and aerialist species), and into two behavior categories (flying vs. swimming). We also compu...