Evaluation of abundance indexes in open population studies: a comparison in populations of small mammals in southern Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Graipel,ME
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Hernández,MIM, Salvador,C
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Brazilian Journal of Biology
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1519-69842014000300553
• topic: Cormack-Jolly-Seber; MNKA; number of individuals; total captures; capture success

Many manuscripts comparing populations and/or analysing the structure of animal communities use indexes of captures as synonymous of abundance. However, the basic methods more suitable to this assumption - probabilistic estimates based on equal capture probability - have not been considered. In this study, the deviations caused by different types of capture indexes are compared with a common probabilistic population estimator (Cormack-Jolly-Seber). The analyses showed that Minimum Number Known Alive (MNKA) and the number of individuals showed greater association with the population estimator than with non-probabilistic indexes based on recaptures. Therefore, none of the indexes presented the same performance to estimate population size estimation which can lead to ecological misinterpretation. Some recommendations were also described.