Scalar considerations in population trend estimates: Implications for recovery strategy planning for species of conservation concern

[摘要] ABSTRACT Broad-scale population trends are often used to identify and list species of conservation concern and as baselines to surmise which recovery actions might arrest or reverse declines. It is therefore important that trends are quantified regionally, so that finer-scale assessments can be made about the plausible causes of declines and targeted conservation actions can be implemented. We estimated regional population trends for a grassland bird, the Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), to compare with trends from provincial analyses used for risk assessment, to identify the regions contributing most substantially to population declines. We used 45 yr of count data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, across 35 agricultural census divisions in southern Ontario, Canada, to develop spatially explicit hierarchical Bayesian models of regional population trends. Population trends were negative in 30 of 35 census divisions, 6 of which had 95% credibility intervals (CI) that did not include zero. In 3...

[学科分类] 动物科学

[关键词] hierarchical modeling;spatially explicit;Bayesian;population decline;Bobolink;policy development;management planning;trend mapping