Expert opinions of demographic rates of Argentine black and white tegus in South Florida

We illustrate the utility of expert elicitation, explicit recognition of uncertainty, and the value of information for directing management and research efforts for invasive species, using tegu lizards (Salvator merianae) in southern Florida as a case study. We posited a post-birth pulse, matrix model, which was parameterized using a 3-point process to elicit estimates of tegu demographic rates from herpetology experts. We fit statistical distributions for each parameter and for each expert, then drew and pooled a large number of replicate samples from these to form a distribution for each demographic parameter. Using these distributions, we generated a large sample of matrix models to infer how the tegu population...

Categories: Data; Types: Citation; Tags: Miami-Dade County, FL, USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC), Wildlife Biology, expert elicitation, invasive species, All tags... matrix model, Fewer tags