To my best knowledge, studies in this field were dedicated mainly to the question whether age and sex ratios in hunting bag reflect age and sex ratios in natural population, but I do not know publications focusing on the relationship between population density of game species and hunting bags.

Clearly, using hunting bag as an indicator of population density reqiures standartized sampling effort. In case of game species this would include number of hunters, methods of hunting, weather conditions and, maybe, some economic parameters. I think it is possible to use such indicator in the number of countries, or regions. However, if there are restrcitions for shooting animals of the certain sex and age, the increase of the population density (due to increase of the proportion of these groups) could be not reconized. So, we are coming back to the question of relation between population structure and the structure of hunting bags.

I saw couple of publications relating density of voles to the number of animals/100 traps, but they are in Russian and published not in the peer-reviewed magazines. Well, if these are of interest for you, drop me a line, I'll try to send you a copy

I speak russian, Nikolaj. Please send copy or link, if these are downloadable. Problem is the search systems, I newer saw much information on the topic I asked.

Neither did I. I shall try to get copies of publications as soon as possible. Also take a look at our article:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225576788_The_State_of_Populations_and_Selective_Hunting_of_Game_Ungulates_in_the_Middle_Urals?ev=prf_pub

it is in Russian again... but I asked Dr. Korytin to provide an English version of the article. Hopefully, he'll join the researchgate at particpate in the discussion.

Article The State of Populations and Selective Hunting of Game Ungul...

Nikolaj, ja govoriu i cytaju po russki :) Spasibo zaranee.

Zdravstvuj Linas!

I understand your problem. In my opinion it would be best answered by statisticians. Perhaps the following very fresh publication will be of some light for you (I myself haven't read it yet, but I will try those 122 pages):

Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2014 16:44:49 GMT (1610kb)

Title: Introduction to Neutrosophic Statistics

Authors: Florentin Smarandache

Categories: cs.AI

Comments: 122 pages, many geometrical figures, many tables

MSC-class: 28E10

Journal-ref: Published as a book by Sitech in 2014

\\

Neutrosophic Statistics means statistical analysis of population or sample

that has indeterminate (imprecise, ambiguous, vague, incomplete, unknown) data.

For example, the population or sample size might not be exactly determinate

because of some individuals that partially belong to the population or sample,

and partially they do not belong, or individuals whose appurtenance is

completely unknown. Also, there are population or sample individuals whose data

could be indeterminate. In this book, we develop the 1995 notion of

neutrosophic statistics. We present various practical examples. It is possible

to define the neutrosophic statistics in many ways, because there are various

types of indeterminacies, depending on the problem to solve.

\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2000 , 1610kb)

p. Marku, dziekuje, czy Pan pracuje w tym kierunku?

Graphs are interesting, however, statistics require special software?

We could have discussion on this method, if you already know it. Maybe paper.

Lacze zyczenia

Niezupelnie, not exactly. I'm dealing with inorganic matter (physics of magnetism) so my problems with data processing are of slightly different nature. Nevertheless I am very interested to obtain as reliable results as currently possible - that's natural, I think, not only in physics. Correct statistical inference plays significant role here. Currently I am working on a quite new paradigm in data processing. Namely, in my humble opinion, we shouldn't strive for the "best fitted curve" but rather we should present the values of recovered parameters describing it, necessarily together with their uncertainties, in such a way that uncertainties of the reconstructed curve are comparable to those inferred from experimental data. I think there must be something inherently wrong (at least in the software) when the uncertainties of a simulated curve (who cares to present them anyway?) are roughly 4 times smaller than original data precision ...

Cheers and greetings

@Marek, I will be interested in your findings. Da mi Pan znac, jak skoczy to badanie?

zyczenia skladam

@Linas: I would be delighted to share my findings with you and with the rest of world, of course. The problem is I'm not a statistician. Maybe I am missing something trivial? Perhaps the rarely mentioned, and therefore ignored by me, correlations between searched parameters are the source of my strange observation? More precisely, I'm trying to connect familiar thinking about random variables and their distributions with interval computations. Neither the interval community nor the probabilists/statistitians succeeded with such a task, so I'm on my own. No warranty of success, but many questions to be sensibly answered. On the other hand, the usual assumptions (never checked in practice!) that the data have normal (gaussian) distributions (or at least symmetrical), that deviations are "small", and so on, are making me uneasy.

Hi everyone,

the use of hunting bags can reflect the population only if hunting is randomly achieve ... 

However, hunting bags can be very useful to detect some trend in the population sier but also in the productivity of the targeted species.

What can of information do you have? is it only the number of hunted individuals ? Do you have age or sex information too?

These aspects have been mainly investigated for management of waterfowl in North America. Some keys in this analysis are:

- is there any heterogeneity in the hunting population (sex, age, class of individual) - as mentioned before? 

- do you have some information on the reporting rate? is there a regular protocol to get information on hunting bags, ... 

The paper of Anderson & Burnham gives a lots of useful definition when dealing with exploited population (game species, fisheries,...). I can send you the paper if you are interested.

A look at the Book of Williams, Nichols & Conroy could also help. 

I have just found a paper by Imperio et al. 2010 corresponding to your question.

Hope it helps.

Guillaume

Article Investigating population dynamics in ungulates: Do hunting s...

Article Population ecology of the mallard. VI. The effect of exploit...

Book Analysis and Management of Animal

thank you, Guillaume

... stumbled upon this discussion, as I do some work on the usefulness of sel-reported hunting bags for populaiton estimates and regulation... from an economic point of view. 

The discussion above overlooks perhaps that hunting bags are often self-reported, by hunters, which may make them subject to potential biases. One thing is the potential for over-reporting from sheer bragging (angler style), but more problematic is the fact that self-reporting may be used for management and regulation of hunters behavior. This can cause them to provide untruthful strategic answers for many different reasons. Depending on design of regulation, this complicates the use of bag rate for population estimates considerably.

The problem is not studied much in hunting I believe, but extensively in fisheries management and econmics.

/ Bo

Hi Bo,

I agree with you. One of the main issue when dealing with hunting bags and/or hunting recoveries is to be able to estimate the reporting rate, i.e. the probability that given the individual is hunted and retrieved by the hunter, the hunter will report the information or not. In some studies in North-America using both reward and standard tags, some difference based on the location of the hunter and also on the hunted species were found. I also worked in the European context and this is also quite different. The reporting behavior is not the same, there is more distrust between some hunters and some scientists that impacts the reporting behavior.

Furthermore, when dealing with abundant game species, the reporting is quite high, but when the game species is declining, some hunters may be afraid of giving their hunting bags just because they don't want to give clues to restrict their hunting activities ...

The behavior issue is approached when dealing with hunting but we usually lck information and data to really be able to study this ...

Cheers,

Guillaume

Is the situation different, if reporting is not voluntary , but absolutely obligatory?

I think many of the same issues will remain. In Denmark, you have to report your annual bag in order to get a renewal of your hunting license. But there are no instruments to ensure truth-telling, There is no consequence of stating high or small numbers. And if there were e.g. a tax on hunting bag, they would systematically underreport even if mandatory, and society would have little option to control the truth.