by darryl » Thu Mar 21, 2019 4:51 pm
Increasing the number of surveys per season will help, depending on how you do that. At some stage doing more surveys per unit per season becomes inefficient in terms of occupancy estimation because the probability of a false absence becomes small, so you're better to increase the number of units surveyed per season. BUT, you do want to have enough surveys per unit per season for things to work well, where 'enough' depends on the level of occupancy and detection. As Jim says, tools like GenPRES can be useful for you to assess different options.
One further comment though is whether you really expect there to be a long-term trend (eg a decline at a constant rate) in the first place, or whether any change might be more variable. Also, if there really is a change of 30% per year, by the time you have enough data to detect it statistically with high power, it may already be too late...