William Link, Ph.D. (Former Employee)

Captive breeding is key to management of severely endangered species, but maximizing captive production can be challenging because of poor knowledge of species breeding biology and the complexity of evaluating different management options. In the face of uncertainty and complexity, decision-analytic approaches can be used to identify optimal management options for maximizing captive...

Brian Dennis described the field of ecology as “fertile, uncolonized ground for Bayesian ideas.” He continued: “The Bayesian propagule has arrived at the shore. Ecologists need to think long and hard about the consequences of a Bayesian ecology. The Bayesian outlook is a successful competitor, but is it a weed? I think so.” (Dennis 2004) Review info: Bayesian Analysis for Population...

Misidentification of animals is potentially important when naturally existing features (natural tags) such as DNA fingerprints (genetic tags) are used to identify individual animals. For example, when misidentification leads to multiple identities being assigned to an animal, traditional estimators tend to overestimate population size. Accounting for misidentification in capture...

Natural tags based on DNA fingerprints or natural features of animals are now becoming very widely used in wildlife population biology. However, classic capture-recapture models do not allow for misidentification of animals which is a potentially very serious problem with natural tags. Statistical analysis of misidentification processes is extremely difficult using traditional likelihood...

This work considers the estimation of dispersion in materials via an interferometric technique. At its core, the problem involves extracting the quadratic variation in phase over a range of wavelengths based on measured optical intensity. The estimation problem becomes extremely difficult for weakly dispersive materials where the quadratic nonlinearity is very small relative to the...

Mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) are surveyed in North America with a Call-Count Survey (CCS) and the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). Analyses in recent years have identified inconsistencies in results between surveys, and a need exists to analyze the surveys using modern methods and examine possible causes of differences in survey results. Call-Count Survey observers collect...