Estimating abundance from counts in large data sets of irregularly spaced plots using spatial basis functions

DOI10.1007/S13253-014-0192-ZzbMATH Open1325.62217arXiv1410.3163OpenAlexW2020465528WikidataQ58055859 ScholiaQ58055859MaRDI QIDQ894826FDOQ894826

Authors: Jay M. Ver Hoef, John K. Jansen 

Publication date: 24 November 2015

Published in: Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Monitoring plant and animal populations is an important goal for both academic research and management of natural resources. Successful management of populations often depends on obtaining estimates of their mean or total over a region. The basic problem considered in this paper is the estimation of a total from a sample of plots containing count data, but the plot placements are spatially irregular and non randomized. Our application had counts from thousands of irregularly-spaced aerial photo images. We used change-of-support methods to model counts in images as a realization of an inhomogeneous Poisson process that used spatial basis functions to model the spatial intensity surface. The method was very fast and took only a few seconds for thousands of images. The fitted intensity surface was integrated to provide an estimate from all unsampled areas, which is added to the observed counts. The proposed method also provides a finite area correction factor to variance estimation. The intensity surface from an inhomogeneous Poisson process tends to be too smooth for locally clustered points, typical of animal distributions, so we introduce several new overdispersion estimators due to poor performance of the classic one. We used simulated data to examine estimation bias and to investigate several variance estimators with overdispersion. A real example is given of harbor seal counts from aerial surveys in an Alaskan glacial fjord.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3163

Recommendations

• N ‐Mixture Models for Estimating Population Size from Spatially Replicated Counts
• A model-based approach for making ecological inference from distance sampling data
• Line Transect Sampling in Small Regions
• Estimating Annual Total Heron Population Counts
• Estimation of Population Trajectories from Count Data

zbMATH Keywords

samplingintensity functionoverdispersionrandom effectsPoisson processspatial point processeschange-of-support

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Inference from spatial processes (62M30) Applications of statistics to environmental and related topics (62P12)

Cites Work

• Semiparametric Regression
• Fixed Rank Kriging for Very Large Spatial Data Sets
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Bayesian Prediction of Spatial Count Data Using Generalized Linear Mixed Models
• Statistical Methods for Spatial Data Analysis
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• A Simplex Method for Function Minimization
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Who Invented the Delta Method?
• Combining Incompatible Spatial Data
• Statistics for spatial data
• Overdispersion: Models and estimation.
• An Algorithm for Finding Best Matches in Logarithmic Expected Time
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Case studies in environmental statistics
• Nonparametric estimation of mean and dispersion functions in extended generalized linear models
• Approximating Point Process Likelihoods with GLIM
• A model-based approach for making ecological inference from distance sampling data
• Asymptotic Properties of Estimators for the Parameters of Spatial Inhomogeneous Poisson Point Processes
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Low‐Rank Smoothing Splines on Complicated Domains

Cited In (7)

• Fitting statistical distributions to sea duck count data: implications for survey design and abundance estimation
• A spatial hierarchical model for abundance of three ice-associated seal species in the eastern Bering Sea
• Statistical Methods for Estimating Caribou Abundance Using Postcalving Aggregations Detected by Radio Telemetry
• Spatially explicit approach to estimation of total population abundance in field surveys
• Estimating Annual Total Heron Population Counts
• Modeling joint abundance of multiple species using Dirichlet process mixtures
• Threshold knot selection for large-scale spatial models with applications to theDeepwater Horizondisaster

Uses Software

• R
• spatstat
• ArcGIS Desktop
• SAS
• SemiPar
• spBayes
• daewr
• SAS/STAT
• FRK

This page was built for publication: Estimating abundance from counts in large data sets of irregularly spaced plots using spatial basis functions

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q894826)