Introduction

There are a wide range of approaches available for investigating the dynamics of the demographics and occurrence of ecological populations. So many that it would take an entire book, or more, to cover the important issues and options in sufficient detail. In this single chapter it is clearly impossible for me to go into detail on specific approaches, so I instead focus more on outlining some of the options available for addressing different types of questions and on general considerations, particularly with respect to program design. Inherently, because of those whom I have been fortunate enough to work with and learn from to this point in my career, most of the methods I discuss assume that detection of the items of interest (whether it be individual animals or plants, or of a species as a whole) will be imperfect, i.e. it will not be observed with certainty whenever you venture into the field to find it. However, many of the issues I will discuss are still relevant even with perfect detection. Recommended readings for further details on the topics I cover are Williams et al. (2002), Amstrup et al. (2005) and MacKenzie et al. (2006).

Before launching into the main thrust of this chapter, I am going to make a few comments (some might even say a rant) about the importance of thinking hard about Why, What, and How during the conception stage of any monitoring program. Although these are fairly basic questions that have been discussed early in this volume, their fundamental importance cannot be emphasized enough.