3 - Statistical analysis of response to control

Summary

Vertebrate pest control is replete with stories of the wily trapper, pitting his or her experience and knowledge against the sly predator. But what are the effects of trapping on predator abundance or the damage by the predators? This chapter is concerned with methods and analyses for determining both. As in Chapter 2, many of the principles come from experimental design, but the applications here are different. The chapter briefly examines the effects of control on the frequency distribution of damage or pest abundance, then reviews statistical analyses used. A variety of control methods, such as poisoning, trapping and fencing, then control topics, such as predation and infectious diseases, are reviewed. The control topics correspond to those described in Chapter 2 with two extra topics.

Conway (1981) classified five alternative techniques for pest control: (i) pesticides, (ii) biological control, (iii) cultural control by use of practices to alter habitats, (iv) resistance such as breeding of crop varieties that are more resistant to pest attack, and (v) sterile mating control to reduce fertility possibly through genetic methods.

The relevance of the techniques to pest species varying from r-selected pests to intermediate to K-selected pests was described by Conway (1981). Species with high birth rates, more variable abundance, amongst a variety of other population characteristics, are r-selected species, and those with low birth rates and less variable abundance are K-selected species.