A Random Field Approach to Transect Counts of Wildlife Populations

Line transect counting of a wildlife population is considered a sampling from a planar marked point process, where the marks describe the detectability of the animals. Sampling properties of transect counts and a new density estimator are derived from a counting process, which is a shot‐noise field induced by the marked point process. A general formula for the sampling variance of a transect is derived and applied to compare five common types of transects. Some stereological connections of transect sampling and density estimators are shown.