A Brief History of Capture–Recapture

Abstract

Capture–recapture methods have a long history and in this introductory chapter we begin by briefly describing some of the defining research papers up to about 1950. The rest of the book takes us up to the beginning of 2019. Model building plays an essential part in this book and some basic ideas are described relating to fixed and random sample sizes. Classical frequency and Bayesian models are briefly introduced using a simple two-sample capture–recapture model as an example. Reviews referring to capture–recapture for both open and closed populations and extensions to epidemiology, site-occupancy models, evolutionary ecology, spatial and statespace models form the conclusion.