Banding geese in the arctic

Dr. Jay Von Bank (Delta’s Scientific Director) is in the arctic banding geese. We band to get population estimates and survival rates.

Lincoln estimates allow us to enumerate animal populations. Let’s do a simple example to show the simplicity of Lincoln estimates.

Say we band 10,000 White-fronts. Then we harvest 100,000 of which 1,000 are banded. So banded birds are 1,000/100,000 = 0.01. That means the population is 10,000/0.01 = 1,000,000.

Lincoln estimates are how we count most goose populations.

They depend on harvest estimates, so it is no surprise that Jay is also working on good measures of harvest.