Missing occasion covariates

[ked]

Hi all,
I just wanted to confirm that MARK doesn't allow missing values in an occasion covariate (e.g. an annual weather variable with a couple of years missing). That was always my understanding, and I've seen this discussed here for individual covariates, but just wanted to double-check. As a (conservative?) means of dealing with it, I had standardized the weather variables to have a mean of zero, and then filled in the missing values with zero (equivalent to the standardized mean). Is there any other way of dealing with this?
Thanks!

[bacollier]

Hi all,
I just wanted to confirm that MARK doesn't allow missing values in an occasion covariate (e.g. an annual weather variable with a couple of years missing). That was always my understanding, and I've seen this discussed here for individual covariates, but just wanted to double-check. As a (conservative?) means of dealing with it, I had standardized the weather variables to have a mean of zero, and then filled in the missing values with zero (equivalent to the standardized mean). Is there any other way of dealing with this?
Thanks!

If you have a record in the capture history for that occasion, then no, you should not have a missing occasion-specific covariate.

bret