Title
WCS Working Paper No. 46 - Occupancy-Related Metrics for Wildlife Status Assessment
Author(s)
Timothy O'Brien; Samantha Strindberg; Robert Wallace
Published
2015
Abstract
WCS Global Conservation Program is exploring the development of measures of conservation effectiveness focusing on how WCS management interventions affect wildlife populations, wildlife habitat, threats to wildlife and law enforcement effectiveness,
natural resource governance, and livelihoods. Here we report on a two-day internal workshop in August 2012, where we invited WCS staff and friends with expertise in occupancy analysis and monitoring to examine the use of occupancy as a metric for within and cross-site comparisons of conservation effectiveness in WCS programs. Occupancy methods are potentially efficient in terms of their application across large areas and the ability to combine multiple sources of information, while providing a scientifically defensible metric of the proportion of a landscape of interest that is occupied. Occupancy-based analyses also can yield information on species richness, relative abundance, and dynamics of species and communities; explanatory variables for detectability and occupancy can be included during analysis. In addition, the results of occupancy analyses can be displayed in a spatially explicit manner, which permits conservation decision makers or donors to easily visualize how conservation management is influencing the status of conservation targets in space and time.
This document highlights some of the key results of the meeting, as well as provides a background to the uses of occupancy analysis in a variety of landscape contexts. In the appendices we give an overview of occupancy methods and a bibliography of recent uses of occupancy models for a variety of taxa.
We agreed that WCS should use unbiased estimates of occupancy, abundance, density or relative abundance whenever possible.
We reached a broad consensus that occupancy will be a useful metric for comparing landscape/seascape level wildlife trends between sites and over time.
We also recognized the limitations of occupancy to provide information on certain kinds of species that are important to our landscapes and seascapes.
We did not suggest that occupancy be the only metric of conservation effectiveness or that current best practices be abandoned in favor of occupancy.
We recognized that many interventions are indirect and often we are not the management authority in our Scapes. Under these circumstances, it may be hard to attribute changes in target species abundance and occupancy to our intervention efforts.
We concluded that occupancy would be a useful metric for the majority of target species in the WCS landscape and seascape portfolio.
We suggested four activities to move forward on the use of occupancy as a WCS landscape monitoring metric:
Investigate retro-fitting occupancy analyses to current sampling designs and datasets.
Encourage collaboration within and among Regional Programs to increase the power of their monitoring programs by standardizing monitoring data (The development of the camera trap database is a start).
A series of workshops at NCEAS under the NCEAS/TNC/WCS NATURELAB program to investigate structured decision making, monitoring, and assessment of conservation effectiveness in WCS Scapes.
Development of test landscapes in each region (NA, LA, Asia, Africa, Marine) where we engage in occupancy analyses to establish the utility of the efforts.
Keywords
species occupancy; metrics
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