Book
Proteus' Senior Biometrician Darryl MacKenzie has been celebrating this month with the release of the second edition of his book Occupancy Estimation and Modeling. It has been a long time in the making, but Darryl and coauthors have done a fantastic job adding to and improving what was already a very good book. Well done to you all! More details about the book, and access to the files associated with many of the examples, are available here.
Ducks
For the past three years we have been assisting New Zealand Fish and Game with the mallard monitoring programmes conducted by most Fish and Game regions during March/April each year, just prior to the opening of the waterfowl hunting season (first weekend of May). Mallards are a non-migratory species in New Zealand and were introduced as a game species during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and have since hybridised with the native grey duck. The mallard, or 'greylard', duck is the most numerous of the waterfowl species in New Zealand, hence is the main species which is harvested by duck hunters. This month we reviewed the results from Fish and Games 2017 surveys, provided suggestions on how they can improve the monitoring, and ideas on how to better incorporate this information into their management of the mallard population.
Courses
It's been a busy month running courses, with 4.5-day occupancy modelling courses being run in Invermay, near Dunedin (NZ) and then in Perth (Australia) 10 days later! Both groups were lively and managed to ask a few questions of Darryl that he hadn't had before, even after teaching the course more than 60 times! More details of the types of courses we run can be found on our Courses page.