Mark. C. Conner

Improvement of a Catch-per-unit-effort Estimator for White-tailed Deer Populations

Catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) is a useful index of population density that is often applied to harvested populations. Because CPUE is an economical index and data collection is simple, we wanted to enhance the user-friendliness and accessibility of a tool for tracking deer population abundance by recoding an existing FORTRAN estimator to JMP scripting language (JSL). Using the revised CPUE-JMP method, we estimated an antlered white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) population on Chesapeake Farms, Maryland, from 1981-2006 to compare the performance of CPUE techniques in a short (one-...