Ok I'm a normal reader of Ecolog but I haven't posted before. I've finally
registered, and will now contribute to this thread.
The methods used by Marcus Rowcliff, Chris Carbon, et al. have been field
tested on BCI Panama (by Roland Kays and others). Most of these publications
are still in prep or in review. The first published manuscript that has
information on testing the methods outlined in the 2008 paper has recently
been posted online at Methods in E&E:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2011.00094.x/abstract
My understanding of their results (I'm a post-doc working with Roland Kays,
thus I'm also privy to some unpublished results) is that these methods work
quite well as long as certain corrections and considerations are made. The
paper I've posted the URL of above discusses many of these in detail. The
upshot of this work is that it is not absolutely necessary to mark animals
to obtain accurate density estimates. There are some exceptions, but these
techniques/analyses represent a powerful new tool for quickly, accurately,
and cheaply estimating population density. You can also see more popular
science style discussions of our work, master's student thesis projects,
etc...here:
http://agoutienterprise.wordpress.com/
