Summarizing abundance changes in waterbirds: some problems and a possible solution

After conducting replicated counts of migratory waterbirds at a given wetland, some authors choose to compute the mean abundance throughout the study period, whereas others report the peak value or the cumulative total. Here, we use fictitious and real examples to illustrate how some of these procedures can lead to distorted conclusions. For species with skewed abundance distributions, the mean does not summarize the central tendency in the data, and the median should be used; however, for many migratory waterbirds, median abundances at a given site can be null. Also, the probability of double-counting the same individuals increases when replicated surveys cover a long time. Moreover, since the cumulative abundance of a species/assemblage increases with the number of surveys, misleading results can be obtained if researchers apply different sampling efforts. Finally, the ranking and selection of wetlands for waterbird conservation can be misguided if cumulative totals are compared against standard criteria (i.e., Ramsar sites, IBAs). To avoid the above mentioned problems, we propose to use the maximum, peak abundance of a given waterbird species during the course of the study, or the sum of maxima, peak values across all the species in the same waterbird assemblage.