Kristian Munkholm wrote:To conclude, if I go I must be prepared to risk facing a wall of snow forcing me to turn back before I even start searching. Should I be lucky and conditions seem good I must be prepared to walk, walk, walk and walk a little more, still with no guarantee of success.
So you checked the satellite imagery(26/04/2003)? However, maybe climate changed the situation since 2003.
Kristian Munkholm wrote:Oh, and Edvard, you wouldn't happen to have data on time spent searching as well as distance covered?
It would be interesting to see if there was an even closer correlation between time spent in habitat and success than distance covered and success. Likewise, it would be interesting to see if anything could be concluded about the optimal search speed. Moving too slow likely covers too little ground, moving too fast might cause you to miss more snakes along the way.
Yes, would be great to check the effect of time on detection. We are using several GPS units, but some of them (the older ones) do not log time with the coordinates when you use tracklog. Then at the moment when I made the analyses we had incomplete dataset of time, so I had to use distance which was logged on all visited habitats. I think next winter after visiting around 20 habitats in 2016 we will be able to check this also.