Abstract
Wildlife populations can be unmarked, meaning individuals lack visually
distinguishing features for identification; populations may also exhibit
non-independent movements, meaning individuals move together. For either
unmarked or non-independent individuals, models based on spatial
capture-recapture (SCR) approaches estimate abundance, density, and
other population parameters critical for monitoring, management, and
conservation. However, when individuals are both unmarked and
non-independent, few model options exist. One approach has been to apply
unmarked models and not address the non-independence despite
unquantified impacts of overdispersion on bias, precision, and the
ability to make robust ecological inferences. We conducted a simulation
study to quantify the impact of non-independence on the performance of
spatial count (SC) and spatial partial identity models (SPIM), two
SCR-based unmarked modeling approaches, and used the performance of
fully marked and independent SCR as a reference. We varied the levels of
non-independence (aggregation and cohesion), detection probability, and
the number of partial identity covariates used to resolve identities in
SPIM estimation. We expected estimates of abundance and sigma (the
spatial scale of individual movement) to be increasingly biased and less
precise as aggregation and cohesion increased. Results showed that
models indeed became less robust to increasing non-independence,
especially for abundance, but importantly suggested that only SPIM could
be reliably applied under low levels of cohesion when sufficient partial
identity covariates are available. SC yielded consistently biased
estimates with inflated precision that could not be corrected to nominal
levels of coverage. SCR was the most robust across all combinations of
aggregation and cohesion, as expected. We therefore advise against the
use of SC models for estimating population parameters when individuals
are known to be non-independent, caution that SPIM may be used under
narrow ecological conditions, and encourage continued investigations
into sampling design and methods development for populations of unmarked
and non-independent individuals.