Bias and Confidence Interval Coverage of Creel Survey Estimators Evaluated by Simulation

Abstract
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has carried out a complete creel census on Escanaba Lake, Wisconsin for more than 40 years. We used this creel census data set as the basis for simulations of a stratified random three-stage creel survey (stages were days, shifts, and count times) in which harvest was estimated as the product of effort and harvest rate. Effort was estimated from instantaneous counts of anglers, and harvest rate was estimated from completed-trip interviews. We evaluated the bias and precision of estimators of annual angler effort and harvest with creel census data from 3 years of varying angler effort and harvest. This creel survey method resulted in excellent estimates of annual effort. There was no evidence of bias, and coefficients of variation were less than 0.10 even though the standard errors of estimates were somewhat too large, resulting in conservative 95% confidence intervals (97–99% coverage). We found no evidence of bias for a stratum estimator of harvest i...

This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit: