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Estimating Cattle Density Using Wildlife Cameras, Emily Bonebrake

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Quantifying the abundance and distribution of animal populations is critical for effective wildlife research and management. Due to their cost-effectiveness, wildlife cameras have become an increasingly popular tool for estimating population densities. Previously, this technique relied on ‘capture-recapture’ models that utilized re-sightings of individually marked animals, but in recent years methods have been developed to estimate the population densities of unmarked animals. One such method is the random encounter and staying time (REST) technique, which does this by assuming that the cumulative time animals stay within the view of the camera scales linearly with the number of individuals. This allows …