The SECR book

This book is about the methods for describing animal populations that have come to be called 'spatially explicit capture--recapture' or simply 'spatial capture--recapture'. 'SECR' is a general label for these data and models. SECR data are observations of marked animals at known locations. The observations are from a well-defined regime of spatial sampling, most often with traps, cameras, or some other type of passive detector. SECR models are used to estimate parameters of the animal population, particularly the population density. 

The book provides both a gentle introduction and more in-depth treatment of important topics. Part I introduces the concepts of SECR and walks the reader through a simple example. Part II establishes the necessary theory. Part III provides substantial new material on the performance of SECR: Which assumptions really matter? and How should studies be designed? Part IV is a practical guide to SECR modelling with the R package secr. Appendices provide detail on specialised topics such as area and transect searches, spatial mark-resight and non-Euclidean distances.

A pdf version is archived here. An HTML version is also available (this may include corrections and modifications since the last Zenodo version).