Date of Submission
Spring 2014
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Mathematics
Project Advisor 1
Sam Hsiao
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Ecological studies make extensive use of the concept of occupancy of species in various ecological regions of interest. This occupancy measure, given by the proportion of sites occupied, can be an important surrogate to the typical abundance measures to estimate local extinction and colonization probabilities. This project will thoroughly investigate a model of occupancy that accounts for imperfect detection of species using the concept of maximum likelihood. With a simplified occupancy model, we will look at how the precision of such measures are determined and investigate the asymptotic assumption of normality that forms an important part of the model. We will also look at how the model fares in extreme cases where site occupancy and the probability of detection are either too low or high. Finally we will explore the question of determining the appropriate sample size in various cases.
Open Access Agreement
On-Campus only
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Baral, Siddhartha, "Investigating Occupancy Using Maximum Likelihood Estimation" (2014). Senior Projects Spring 2014. 126.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2014/126
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