Applied Population Ecology

Course Type	Course Code	No. Of Credits
Discipline Elective	SHE2ED304	2

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Population ecology is the study of patterns and causes of changes in population sizes across spaces and time of one or more species. Management, conservation and monitoring of species are dependent on the population parameters. Population assessment can also help identify threats and evaluates the performance of conservation initiatives. Thus, study of biological population is crucial for most wildlife conservation and research programs.

A wide variety of estimators can be used to monitor populations, provided they are reliable and replicable. In absence of robust estimators, it becomes difficult to infer whether the change (or lack of it) in the estimator is due to the real populations’ changes or some other factor viz. variation in methodology, field personnel, experience, season etc. Empirical estimation of the probability of detection of the species of interest has undergone most if the recent development in the field of population ecology.

We will be using software platforms in this class. Students will be informed about the practical session and the computer-based exercises will be done using personal laptops or the computer lab facility.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

To critically analyze key concepts in designing population assessment and monitoring studies.
To identify the appropriate sampling methods used for answering different management and research objectives.
To identify properties that make a monitoring program an effective one based on the property of interest to be monitored as per the requirement of diverse stakeholders.

COURSE CONTENT

S. No.	Module
Unit I	Basic question, statistics and modelling
	Asking right questions in monitoring and assessment
	Statistical distribution and sampling
	Modelling basics and information theoretic approach
Unit II	Estimating Population
	Distance Sampling
	Occupancy sampling
	Mark-recapture
Unit III	Modeling Species and Populations
	Population Models for Conservation (PVA)
	Species Distribution Models (SDM)
Unit IV	Citizen Science
	Long-term monitoring (citizen science data)

INDICATIVE READING LIST

Boyce, M. S. (1992). Population viability analysis. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 23(1), 481–497.
Conrad, C. C., & Hilchey, K. G. (2011). A review of citizen science and community-based environmental monitoring: issues and opportunities. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 176(1–4), 273–291.
Efford, M. G., & Dawson, D. K. (2012). Occupancy in continuous habitat. Ecosphere, 3(4), 1–15.
Elith, J., & Leathwick, J. R. (2009). Species distribution models: ecological explanation and prediction across space and time. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 40, 677–697.
Ferrier, S., & Guisan, A. (2006). Spatial modelling of biodiversity at the community level.
Journal of Applied Ecology, 43(3), 393–404
Hutto, R. L., & Young, J. S. (2002). Regional landbird monitoring: perspectives from the northern Rocky Mountains. Wildlife Society Bulletin, 738–750.
Krebs, C. J. (1989). Ecological methodology. Harper & Row New York. Lindenmayer, D. B., & Likens, G. E. (2010). The science and application of ecological monitoring. Biological Conservation, 143(6), 1317–1328.
MacKenzie, D. I., & Nichols, J. D. (2004). Occupancy as a surrogate for abundance estima- tion. Animal Biodiversity and Conservation, 27(1), 461–467.
Nichols, J. D., & Williams, B. K. (2006). Monitoring for conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 21(12), 668–673.
Qureshi, Q., Gopal, R., & Jhala, Y. V. (2018). Twisted tale of the tiger: the case of inappropriate data and deficient science. PeerJ Preprints.
Rodrıguez, J. P., Brotons, L., Bustamante, J., & Seoane, J. (2007). The application of predictive modelling of species distribution to biodiversity conservation. Diversity and Distributions, 13(3), 243–251.