Optimizing ecological survey effort over space and time

Abstract

Previous studies that optimize allocation of surveillance resources over space have assumed that detection rates are constant over time and that travel or survey costs are the same for all sites. Other recent research explicitly accounts for stochastically varying detection rates and distinct travel costs but restricts attention to the optimal number of visits to a single site. Here, we integrate these approaches to construct a model that optimizes the allocation of surveillance effort over both space and time. The solution defines the budget that should be allocated to each site and the number of visits over which that search budget should be expended. We show that the solution has close af..