Wildlife Society Bulletin

Abstract We conducted spatially-explicit simulations of deer populations and survey strategies to investigate how a common deer survey technique—road-based spotlight surveys—might violate the assumptions of distance sampling and produce biased estimates of population size. In our simulations, systematically or randomly placed linear transect surveys tended to produce population estimates with smaller bias and greater precision than road-based surveys; road-based surveys were highly sensitive to the distribution of deer in the study area.