Wildlife population assessment : changing priorities driven by technological advances

Funding: TAM’s time for this review was covered under the ACCURATE project, funded by the US Navy Living Marine Resources program (contract no. N3943019C2176), and he also thanks partial support by CEAUL (funded by FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, through the project UIDB/00006/2020).Advances in technology are having a large effect on the priorities for innovation in statistical ecology. Collaborations between statisticians and ecologists have always been important in driving methodological development, but increasingly, expertise from computer scientists and engineers is also needed. We discuss changes that are occurring and that may occur in the future in surveys for estimating animal abundance. As technology advances, we expect classical distance sampling and capture-recapture to decrease in importance, as camera (still and video) survey, acoustic survey, spatial capture-recapture and genetic methods continue to develop and find new applications. We explore how these changes are impacting the work of the statistical ecologist.Peer reviewe