When have we looked hard enough? A novel method for setting minimum survey effort protocols for flora surveys

By G. Garrard, Sarah A. Bekessy, M. McCarthy, Brendan A. Wintle. 2008

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is now a substantial body of literature documenting the detectability of plants and animals under standard survey conditions. Despite the evidence that many flora and fauna species have detection probabilities of less than one, it is still the default assumption of most environmental impact assessment processes that if a species is present, it will be detected. Here we briefly review a number of existing studies that have estimated the survey effort necessary to detect animal species, based on what is known about their detection rates in standard surveys. We then propose a novel method, based on failure-time analysis, for quantifying the detectability of and determin- ing appropriate survey effort for plant species during flora surveys.We provide computer code for implementing the method in the Bayesian freewareWinBUGS. Methods for estimating detectability can be used to inform minimum survey requirements and have important applications in environmental impact assessment and monitoring.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e28247bebe757a7eee62d5fad4b035a0c8146ea

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Citations in the corpus

Conservation and the botanist effect (2011, unknown): “Consequently, mathematical frameworks that account for heterogeneous detection probabilities in surveys (e.g. Etterson et al., 2009; Garrard et al., 2008; Zuur et al., 2009), mainly developed for fauna surveys, are also highly relevant to vascular plants (Chen et al., 2009; Garrard et al., 2008).”
Quantifying levels of biological invasion: towards the objective classification of invaded and invasible ecosystems (2011, background): “…on occupancy and abundance are generally widely available, these measures are not without limitations: data about recently naturalized alien species may be lacking, and occupancy and abundance may be underestimated due to issues such as poor detection (Garrard et al., 2008; Regan et al., 2011).”
Analysing and mapping species range dynamics using occupancy models (2013, background): “elling occupancy via estimation of the rate of detections within single survey visits (Garrard et al., 2008; Guillera-Arroita et al., 2011, 2012).”
Modelling of species distributions, range dynamics and communities under imperfect detection: advances, challenges and opportunities (2017, methodology): “All rights reserved.’ detected within one single visit (e.g. after how many minutes/meters from start) also provides information about detectability (Garrard et al. 2008, Guillera-Arroita et al. 2011); such data can be produced for instance in transect or camera-trap surveys.”
Which plant traits predict species loss in calcareous grasslands with extinction debt? (2012, methodology): “We revisited the sites described in 1923 (Vilberg, 1927) during three summers (2008, 2009 and 2011), trying to cover all phenological aspects and minimize the possibility of false absent species in our dataset (Garrard et al., 2008).”