Design of occupancy studies with imperfect detection

Abstract

Summary1. Occupancy is an important concept in ecology. To obtain an unbiased estimator of occupancy it is necessary to address the issue of imperfect detection, which requires conducting replicate surveys at the sites being sampled. As the allocation of total effort can be done in different ways, occupancy studies should be designed carefully to ensure an efficient use of available resources.2. In this paper we address the design of single‐season single‐species occupancy studies with a focus on: (1) issues relating to small sample sizes and (2) the potential relevance of including the precision of the detectability estimator as a criterion for design. We explore analytically the model with ..