Por Gisela Vitória Cheoo [orientadores: Tiago Marques (DEIO-FCUL) e Len Thomas (University of St Andrews, Scotland)].

Abstract: Management and conservation of wildlife populations is a major concern. Population density is a key ecological variable when making adequate decisions about them. A variety of methods can be used for estimating density. Capture-recapture (CR) methods are a popular alternative, but ignoring the spatial component of captures has historically led to problems with resulting inferences on abundance. Spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) methods use the spatial information to solve two key problems of classical CR: defining a precise study area where captures occur over and reducing unmodeled heterogeneity in capture probabilities. Using a passive acoustic dataset collected over 5 sites and 8 years, we will investigate the use of SECR methods to estimate abundance of bowhead whales through their migration corridor in the Alaska coast.