Designing carnivore surveys.

This chapter examines the challenges associated with planning and implementing a field survey on carnivores. Following the definition of the term ‘survey’, the main issues associated with the several phases of a carnivore survey, such as the planning phase, the establishment of goals and objectives, and the optimal allocation of sampling effort, are discussed. Throughout the chapter, the focus is on the most relevant aspects of studying carnivores in the field, such as dealing with false absences through occupancy modelling, defining the target population and spatial extent of the survey, and implementing a probabilistic sampling scheme under the constraints of field methods commonly used to study carnivores.