Precision of systematic counts

Rapport technique * INRA - Unité de Biométrie, Centre de Versailles (FRA) Diffusion du document : INRA - Unité de Biométrie, Centre de Versailles (FRA); International audience; In this paper, the estimation of a population size from counts in systematically distributed units is considered. The empirical estimator is unbiased if the sampling is uniform. A method for assessing the precision of the empirical estimator from the count data is described. Although the main part of the paper concerns one-dimensional sampling (events distributed along an axis), extensions to systematic counts in multidimensional spaces are available. Furthermore, the described methods also apply to particle counts with edge effect corrections.