Joanna Mills Flemming
4:00 PM EDT
Zoom Link: https://bit.ly/2TGt4ix
Meeting ID: 915 2711 8756
Passcode: sL1O25
A New Approach To Estimating Population Size For Marine Species
The problem of estimating population size has a long history in statistical ecology. However, the abundance and productivity of highly valuable, severely depleted species remain difficult to assess with standard models. By taking advantage of modern genetics, a new way to estimate abundance (and other key parameters such as mortality rates), the close-kin mark-recapture (CKMR) method, has recently been proposed. It only requires small pieces of tissue, taken from either live or dead animals, and generalizes the standard mark-recapture (MR) approach to use the resulting DNA marks to obtain information about relatedness among individuals in the sample. Here we compare CKMR and MR estimates of population size for brook trout populations and speak to the potential of CKMR going forward.