Research overview: mark-resight models for partially marked felid populations

Some felid populations contain a mix of individually identifiable and unidentifiable animals, for example when only some individuals bear distinctive scars, collars, or clear coat patterns. This overview surveys mark-resight and related models that estimate abundance and density from such partially marked populations, combining information from identified individuals with counts of unmarked detections. It explains how these methods bridge the gap between full capture-recapture, which requires identifying everyone, and recognition-free estimators that identify no one, and how they have been adapted into spatial frameworks. Mark-resight approaches are valuable for species like pumas with faint markings or for populations where a subset is collared. The overview situates them within the broader effort to estimate density when individual identification is incomplete or unreliable.