If population, community, and ecosystem ecology of amphibians and reptiles has a central problem, it is that the number of individuals one sees (or hears) does not necessarily reflect the numbers that actually are present. This is true for all wildlife (MacKenzie et al., 2005a) and even for plants (Chen et al., 2013), but the problem may be particularly acute for many amphibians and reptiles because of their cryptic natural histories (Steen, 2010). Most herpetologists are aware of this problem from practical experience, and commonly encounter situations where detection of their study animals varies considerably over very short timescales. This problem has led to considerable interest in thinking about, estimating, and accounting for detection probability (normally abbreviated as p), a topic that has received increasing attention over the past several years (Kellner and Swihart, 2014; Fig. 1).
In this light,...
