| dc.contributor.author | Stewart, Connie. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:35:24Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2005 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2005 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINR08425 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/54757 | |
| dc.description | Although methods of accurately estimating the diet of predators are of great ecological importance, prior to the work of Iverson et al (2004) the methods used were often unsatisfactory. Iverson et al (2004) proposed estimating the diet by matching fatty acid (FA) signatures of predators to those of their prey. Given the potential species in a predator's diet, they were able to use statistical methods to obtain estimates of the proportion of each species in the diet. To date, only point estimates of the diets of predators have been studied. | en_US |
| dc.description | The primary focus of this thesis is interval estimation of the diet composition. As both the FA data and the diet estimates are compositional, and often with zeros, special techniques are required to handle this situation. Our proposed confidence interval methods include both parametric and nonparametric approaches, and mostly rely on bootstrapping techniques. We make use of mixture models as a device to eliminate the zeros for some of the procedures. A simulation study is carried out to evaluate and compare the coverage probabilities and interval lengths of our various confidence interval methods. Our recommended method is then applied to captive seabird data. | en_US |
| dc.description | We also consider two related problems, namely the development of a measure of species contribution to the variability in the seal FA signatures and methods for testing for a difference in the diet. The motivation for this latter problem was real-life seal data that we use to illustrate one of our testing procedures. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2005. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Biology, Biostatistics. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Biology, Zoology. | en_US |
| dc.title | Inference on the diet of predators using fatty acid signatures. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
