ABSTRACT
Environmental managers’ need for accurate information about ecological populations is increasing as the demand for cost-effective management expands. The ability to detect the current status of a population is essential for managers to be able to decide when to take appropriate management action and for assessing the success-or otherwise-of alternative management interventions. Information is needed about population status for scientists to assess and evaluate alternative population models and for understanding population dynamics. In the previous chapter, the idea of sampling and selecting a portion of the population compared with assessing and measuring every individual in the population was introduced. Here, we introduce a range of sampling designs that are particularly relevant to ecological sampling and in fact have been designed mostly with these situations in mind (Thompson, 2003). To be more precise, these designs were developed for surveying populations that are rare and clustered.
