Background
Estimating the abundance of organisms.
Ecology is often referred to as the "study of
distribution and abundance". This being true, we would
often like to know how many of a certain organism are
in a certain place, or at a certain time. Information on
the abundance of an organism, or group of organisms is
fundamental to most questions in ecology.
However, we can rarely do a complete census of the
organisms in the area of interest because of limitations
to time or research funds. Therefore, we usually have to
estimate the abundance of organisms by sampling
them, or counting a subset of the population of interest.
For example, suppose you wanted to know how many
slugs there were in the forests on Mt. Moosilauke. It
would take a lifetime to count them all, but you could
estimate their abundance by counting all the slugs in
carefully chosen smaller areas on the mountain.