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Estimating Nests Not Present At The Time Of Breeding Surveys: An Important Consideration In Assessing Nesting Populations, Peter C. Frederick, Julie A. Heath, Robert Bennetts, Heinz Hafner

Julie Heath

Counts of nest starts are often used as indicators of the size of avian nesting populations, or of avian productivity. However, the accuracy of single or repeated counts of unmarked nests over time for estimating seasonal numbers of nests may be strongly affected by nest events that fall in between survey dates, or that occurred prior to or after the survey period. Accuracy may also be affected by uncertainty in the interpretation of counts due to overlap between starting and ending dates of asynchronous nests during the intervisit interval. To measure the combined magnitude of these effects on survey accuracy, …