Analysis of Aerial Survey Data on Florida Manatee Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Bruce A. Craig, Michael A. Newton , Robert A. Garrott, John E. Reynolds III, and J. Ross Wilcox

Biometrics, 1997, 53:129--146.

Formerly, Technical Report 926, Department of Statistics, University of Wisconsin, Madison. First issued 1994. Last revision August, 1996.

Abstract:

We assess population trends of the Atlantic coast population of Florida manatee, Trichechus manatus latirostris, by reanalyzing aerial survey data collected between 1982 and 1992. To do so, we develop an explicit biological model that accounts for the method by which the manatees are counted, the mammals' movement between surveys, and the behavior of the population total over time. Bayesian inference, enabled by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), is used to combine the survey data with the biological model. We compute marginal posterior distributions for all model parameters and predictive distributions for future counts. Different prior specifications are analyzed to investigate robustness of the results.

Keywords: Bayesian inference, Hidden Markov models, Manatee

Contact Bruce Craig for a reprint.