A graduate course in the quantitative assessment of marine mammal populations. Covers abundance estimation from line transect and mark-recapture data, trend estimation, and the propagation of uncertainty through to a management-relevant quantity.
The methodological core is data integration. Visual survey, passive acoustic detection and photographic identification each carry a distinct blind spot, and combining them properly requires more than averaging the resulting estimates. The course works through joint estimation frameworks, including the 2024 approach now used by two regional assessment programs.
Substantial computational work is required. Students should arrive able to program in at least one statistical language; the course does not teach programming from the beginning.