The ACAPT package provides functions that facilitate the estimation of population trends of long lived species such as albatross and petrels from abundance data, counts specifically. In addition, ACAPT provides functions that support various conservation status assessments associated with population trends, including IUCN Red List assessments (using Criterion A only) and ACAP High Priority Population assessments.
ACAPT is a product developed under the auspices of ACAP through an intersessional group.Following its initial development, ACAPT has been subject to review by the Population and Conservation Status Working Group and Advisory Committee of ACAP (see PaCSWG9 Doc3 Rev2 (https://www.acap.aq/documents/working-groups/population-and-conservation-status-working-group/pacswg9/pacswg9-meeting-documents/5098-pacswg9-doc-03-a-standardised-framework). This review ultimately led to the formal endorsement of ACAPT by ACAP in June 2026.
The functions in ACAPT form part of the overall data processing and standardisation framework, as the Bayesian state space model at the core of ACAPT is still reliant on the input count data being comparable across space and time (and species). Functions that facilitate comparability across space, time, and species are (for now) to be applied separately due to the highly context-specific nature of relevant considerations, e.g., through models detailed in PaCSWG9 Doc3 Rev2.
ACAPT is heavily influenced by the JARA package, and users with more general needs may find JARA is better suited to their application. ACAPT and JARA largely differ in their approaches to forecasting populations and users are encouraged to compare both approaches and decide for themselves as to what the best approach is for their applications.
ACAPT requires an existing installation of JAGS and the support package rjags to run.
You can install the development version of ACAPT like so:
## install.packages("remotes") ## if needed
## install.packages("rjags") ## if needed
remotes::install_github("AustralianAntarcticDivision/ACAPT", build_vignettes=TRUE)Several examples demonstrating the use of the package can be found in the Examples vignette
vignette("Examples", package="ACAPT")Issues relating to using the package for IUCN threat classification are discussed in
vignette("Classification", package="ACAPT")The model and its implementation is described in
vignette("Implementation", package="ACAPT")