Inquiry about camera trap based Distance Sampling (CTDS)

[Nilanjan Basu]

Hello all, I hope all the members of this group are doing well and in good health. I have a question regarding the CTDS. 

Does the "Activity(camera trap)" option on the multiplier wizard of step 5 of Distance software mean the activity level of the species or is it just about whether the species was active or not?

Any kind of guidance will be highly appreciated.

Regards,

Nilanjan Basu

[Eric Rexstad]

Nilanjan

Welcome to the group. I suggest you read Chapter 10 of the Users Guide for the Distance for Windows software that is distributed with the programme. That chapter describes analysis of camera trap data.

I take the following passage from Chapter 10:

The other multiplier is the animal activity, i.e., the average proportion of time within the sampling period when animals are active. Under some circumstances (e.g., when the camera data only comes from the peak activity period), the activity is 1, and you don’t need this multiplier. If you do have it, there is typically uncertainty associated with it. To include this uncertainty in analytic variance estimates of density, you need to enter a value for the standard error of the multiplier and, optionally, the number of degrees of freedom.

The multiplier defines the proportion of time while cameras are active that animals are active and can trigger motion sensors.

If you read other messages in this list, you will see that a CTDS workshop was just announced:

https://workshops.distancesampling.org/ctds-may-2024

with widening participation scholarship applications accepted until 08 April 2024.

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From: distance...@googlegroups.com <distance...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Nilanjan Basu <nba...@gmail.com>
Sent: 23 March 2024 04:46
To: distance-sampling <distance...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [distance-sampling] Inquiry about camera trap based Distance Sampling (CTDS)

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