Inventory of Wintering Geese with a Multispectral Scanner

We used a multispectral scanner with an instantaneous-field-of-view (IFOV) that was larger than a goose to inventory winter concentrations of lesser snow geese (Chen caerulescens) on a water background. A simple linear mixture model of the image-forming process was inverted to estimate the proportion of the IFOV covered by geese. The mixture model prediction of the number of geese was 2% less than a manual count of geese on aerial photographs acquired simultaneously. We suggest that it is possible to inventory white geese and dark geese in mixed concentrations on water from visible and shortwave infrared reflectance measurements. Shortwave infrared (1,420-2,440 nm) reflectance measurements may be used to discriminate among dark species of geese.