Further comments on the use of interview-based data for species distribution studies: a reply to Petracca & Frair

ESTELA LUENGOS VIDAL; CARUSO, NICOLÁS; LUCHERINI, MAURO; GUERISOLI, MARIA DE LAS MERCEDES

ORYX

CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS

Lugar: Cambridge; Año: 2017 vol. 51 p. 209 - 209

0030-6053

In their letter, Petracca & Frair (2016) detail several methodological considerations in our examination of whether interview-based surveys produce unreliable results (Caruso et al., 2016). We thank them for pointing out these issues and, by doing so, helping to strengthen our main point. We agree with most of the methodological concerns that Petracca & Frair raise. We also believe, however, that most of the assumptions we made in our research are common in the conservation literature, especially with respect to species that are rare, cryptic, elusive or otherwise difficult to detect. Robust sampling designs for studying such species frequently require large samples and, consequently, human and monetary resources that are not always available. Thus pooling data from different years is a common practice in occupancy and/or species distribution modelling (Burton et al., 2012; Cuyckens et al., 2014). We also pooled the presence/absence information of the five camera traps at each site, to increase the detection probability of the species per site. By doing so, we aimed to provide a more reliable estimate of the presence status of each species at each site.