On predicting abundance from occupancy

Abstract

There is growing interest in predicting the abundance of a species in a region from the occupancy of cells in a uniform grid overlaid on the region. When the number of individuals in each cell follows a negative binomial distribution, prediction is in general not possible from the number of unoccupied cells alone. A prediction method based on the number of unoccupied cells and the number containing a single individual is described and shown to work well on simulated and real data.