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Abstract:
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Adult mortality has been cited as an important threat to the recovery of the endangered Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris). In an effort to assess manatee mortality, the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission retrieves all carcasses reported throughout the state by the public. However, the reporting and recovery rate of carcasses, and the dynamics thereof, are unknown. This prevents using such information for inference regarding the corresponding rate of mortality. We apply recovery models (e.g., Brownie et al. 1985), typically applied to band recoveries of harvested waterfowl, to the problem of manatee carcass recovery estimation. Data from recovered manatees previously marked with PIT tags, along with relevant covariates, are used to inform the estimation model. We express the model in a Bayesian context and estimate parameters using Markov chain Monte Carlo.
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