Animal Movement in continuous-time spatial capture-recapture surveys

Speaker: Richard Glennie (CREEM)

Abstract

In this talk, I will discuss ongoing work toward developing methods for capture-recapture surveys that explicitly account for animal movement. Capture-recapture surveys conducted in continuous-time record the exact times of encounters between detectors (e.g. cameras, acoustic devices) and animals. Encounters depend on both the detection process and the animal movement. Current spatial capture-recapture methods assume encounters are independent given an animal’s activity centre, ignoring the spatiotemporal correlation induced by contiguous movement paths. Here, we propose a continuous-spacetime approach that incorporates an explicit model of animal movement with the capture-recapture detection process. We approximate the likelihood in discrete-spacetime by a hidden Markov model, and discuss the advantages and limitations of the computational methods that make this approximation feasible. Finally, we describe how the model performs when inferring key population attributes: abundance, movement characteristics, and space use.