Estimating abundance of Antarctic fur seals at South Georgia

This paper presents a description of the statistical approach developed to estimate abundance of Antarctic fur seals at South Georgia. The estimate is based on photographic counts of all the breeding beaches in the fur seal’s distribution range. The images were obtained during comprehensive helicopter surveys conducted during 2006 and 2008. The proposed Bayesian analysis scales up in situ counts to total population size carrying over multiple sources of uncertainty from estimates of proportions of unobserved animals.