Abstracts

Presented by Vijayan Sundararaj - Email: Vijayan.Sundararaj@tamuk.edu

Estimating animal abundance through surveys plays a crucial role in understanding population dynamics for species of wildlife, particularly game species. The Western Gulf Coast (WGC) Mottled Duck population has shown a general decline over the last 4 decades. The primary reasons attributed to this decline are habitat loss and degradation due to human activity, hunting and drought conditions. The conservation partners within the WGC have stressed the need to develop a spatially and statistically improved range-wide survey for the WGC population of mottled ducks. The primary goals of the newer approach are to provide population trends and abundance for the entire WGC population and facilitate population estimation at state-level boundaries. In our redesigned survey analysis, we plan to analyze the historical data to identify factors that contribute to the high variance in the population estimates, evaluate visibility correction factors and re-evaluate the delineation of strata throughout the survey area to improve our ability to estimate the WGC population. These analyses will allow us to identify gaps in knowledge and help guide future research or survey modifications. Further, we also plan to evaluate the potential to extend the mottled duck survey to a lesser-known but a unique area of the South Texas Brush Country where recent anecdotal evidence suggests that this region may support a much higher population of mottled ducks then previously documented. We believe that a redesigned approach to estimating the mottled duck population in the WGC will reduce variation in its population estimate and be beneficial to wildlife survey practitioners and wildlife managers