Introducing the Multi-Analysis Engine in Distance and dealing with unidentified sightings

Speaker: Laura Marshall (CREEM)

Abstract

The multi-analysis engine in Distance is being created to allow issues commonly encountered in large cetacean surveys, such as the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) surveys, to be accounted for within Distance. Such issues include unidentified sightings, model uncertainty and covariate uncertainty. I will also discuss the problems of incorporating unidentified sightings in the analyses in more detail. I will introduce some data that was collected during the ETP surveys to try to establish how difficult different species are to identify and will describe a potentially useful method to improve the allocation of unidentified sighting abundance to specific species.