Dear all,
Our new article is now published in PLoS ONE:
Humpback whales wintering off eastern South America were exploited almost to the point of extinction. Today, that population is recovering but the timing is uncertain. In this article, we revise a previous population status assessment and use an alternative method for model fitting (MCMC), which will hopefully be more widely accessible to ecologists. Our approach allowed us to better investigate and reflect scientific uncertainty around historical population levels. Our approach provides an accessible framework for investigating the status of depleted animal populations for which information is available on historical mortality and intermittent estimates of population size and/or trend.
The detailed R code for implementing the state-space models in this article are provided in full in the supplementary material.
All the best,