William L. Thompson is an ecologist/biometrician with the National Park Service in Anchorage, Alaska, where he helps design long-term monitoring programs for plants and animals in five national parks in southwestern Alaska. He is senior author of Monitoring Vertebrate Populations (Academic Press, 1998). He is also the author of Sampling Rare or Elusive Species: Concepts, Designs, and Techniques for Estimating Population Parameters (Island Press, 2004).
Information regarding population status and abundance of rare species plays a key role in resource management decisions. Ideally, data should be collected using statistically sound sampling methods, but by their very nature, rare or elusive species pose a difficult sampling challenge.
Sampling Rare or Elusive Species describes the latest sampling designs and survey methods for reliably estimating occupancy, abundance, and other population parameters of rare, elusive, or otherwise hard-to-detect plants and animals.