Research overview: sex-specific movement and detection in spatial capture-recapture

In many felids, males range more widely and are detected differently than females, and ignoring these differences biases spatially explicit capture-recapture density estimates. This overview surveys how sex and other individual covariates are incorporated into SECR by allowing the spatial scale of movement and baseline detection to vary among groups, producing more accurate, less biased density and population estimates. It discusses why pooling sexes with very different home-range sizes misrepresents the population, how sex can be assigned from images or inferred, and the broader principle of modeling individual heterogeneity in detection. The overview connects this to study design, since detecting wide-ranging males requires appropriately spaced and extensive arrays. Accounting for sex-specific behavior is a now-standard refinement that improves the reliability of camera-trap density estimates for carnivores with marked sexual differences in movement.