An On-Line Workshop Using a Simple Capture-Recapture Experiment to Illustrate the Concepts of a Sampling Distribution

Carl James Schwarz and Jason Sutherland
Simon Fraser University

Journal of Statistics Education v.5, n.1 (1997)

Copyright (c) 1997 by Carl James Schwarz and Jason Sutherland, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editor.


Estimating the number of fish that return to spawn using capture-recapture methods.

Objectives

Statistical Prerequisites

Student should know:

Equipment needed

Overview

As with human populations, it is often important to know the number of wildlife in a particular region. For example, fisheries managers set quotas for fishers based on estimates of the number of fish present. Unlike human populations, it is impossible to conduct a census - the animals just won't return census forms!

So then, how are wildlife numbers estimated? One common method is called capture-recapture where a set of animals are caught, tagged, and returned to the population at time 1. A while later, at time 2, a second set of animals is caught. Based on the number of tagged animals found in the second sample, biologists can estimate the size of the population.

In this workshop, you will examine a simple capture-recapture experiment often used in fisheries management to estimate the number of salmon that return to spawn.

Workshop organization

This workshop consists of 4 modules. It is suggested that each be completed before starting the next module. The modules are:
  1. Background information on salmon.
  2. Point estimation of the escapement.
  3. Using a sampling bowl to simulate the experiment.
  4. Using a computer simulation to investigate the properties of the method.

Developed by Carl James Schwarz and Jason Sutherland at Simon Fraser University

This workshop is part of a collection of SFU Statistics workshops which may be accessed by pointing your web browser to
http://www.math.sfu.ca/stats/Innovation/workshopindex.html


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