Wildlife Ecology ESPM 114

3. INDEX (indirect sampling)
Choose an appropriate index that indirectly represents the population (pellet groups, road
kills, scent stations, tracks, nests, etc.) and use the data to find trends in population (i.e. more
dense populations in some areas compared to others, decreasing or increasing population
over time). If you use this method, you must have some information, like a previous study,
about how the index translates into numbers of individuals, and then make the conversion
from numbers of indices to numbers of animals. For example, you may have evidence that
there is an extremely high correlation between the number of nests and the number of feral
pigs, and that each nest is associated with 4 pigs in a given area. Rather than counting each of
the pigs (which may be difficult to detect), you can simply count the number of nests (the
index), multiply by 4, and have a reasonably accurate estimate of the number of pigs in the
sampled area with much less effort.

DETAILED ASSIGNMENT

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