Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Arkansas
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Given the potential for dramatic changes to wildlife distribution and abundance under various climate change scenarios there is a great need to quickly collect and process reliable information on wildlife populations. Mallards are popular game birds in North America and their numbers are often used as a surrogate to gauge the health of other duck species (Johnson et al. 1997). However, winter surveys for mallards have generally used judgment or representative rather than probability samples, making it difficult to draw wider inferences and complicating comparisons of estimates by different researchers (Pearse et al. 2008a, Reinecke et al. 1992). We propose to develop a set of streamlined tools and protocol for selecting statistically appropriate, randomized sampling frames and rapidly processing and analyzing the collected data.