Monitoring the size and demographic characteristics of animal populations is fundamental to the fields of wildlife ecology and wildlife management. A diverse suite of population monitoring methods have been developed and employed during the past century, but challenges in obtaining rigorous population estimates remain. I used simulation to address survey design issues for monitoring a moose population at Togiak National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska using finite population block kriging. In the first chapter, I compared the bias in the Geospatial Population Estimator (GSPE; which uses finite population block kriging to estimate animal abundance) between two survey unit configurations. After finding that substantial bias was induced through the use of the historic survey unit configuration, I concluded that the ''standard" unit configuration was preferable because it allowed unbiased estimation. In the second chapter, I examined the effect of sampling intensity on performance of the GSPE. I concluded that bias and confidence interval coverage were unaffected by sampling intensity, whereas the coefficient of variation (CV) and root mean squared error (RMSE) decreased with increasing sampling intensity. In the final chapter, I examined the effect of spatial clustering by moose on model performance. Highly clustered moose distributions induced a small amount of positive bias, confidence interval coverage lower than the nominal rate, higher CV, and higher RMSE. Some of these issues were ameliorated by increasing sampling intensity, but if highly clustered distributions of moose are expected, then substantially greater sampling intensities than those examined here may be required.