POPAN and RELEASE

[kristamcd]

I am using POPAN to generate abundance estimates from mark-recapture data collected over three seasons. When attempting to investigate GOF using RELEASE from within MARK by pulling down the "Tests" menu and selecting "Program RELEASE GOF", I only receive the results of Test 1 (I want Tests 2 and 3). I haven't been able to identify a reason why this may occur, either in the manual or within the forum, but please forgive me if it's something really obvious and I've simply overlooked it. I appreciate any insight you may have to offer.

[abreton]

Gentle Intro, Page 5-7:

RELEASE is primarily intended for standard live recapture models,
although it can be tweaked to handle some recovery models as well.

I suspect you have > 1 group integrated into your encounter histories? The null hypothesis for Test 1,

Gentle Intro, Page 5-7:

all parameters φi and pi have the same value across ... groups (i.e., there is no difference in survival (φi) or recapture (pi ) considered simultaneously among groups).

Note the 'simultaneously' ... this implies that the test doesn't differentiate whether the 'differences' (if any) are due to differences in survival or recapture rates. For this reason,

Gentle Intro, Page 5-7:

Since this severely limits [Test 1's] utility, ... we actively discourage it’s use, since it is possible to do far more sophisticated analysis if you have capture histories from individually marked animals

Regarding Tests 2 and 3. You mentioned you had three seasons, if that's true then some of your encounter histories might look like 011, 010, 100 etc. Without getting into the details ... if you revisit the program Release section/chapter 5 I think you'll conclude that three occasions are not enough data ... or are enough for one component test at best. That's one reason why you may be getting no results. Another reason may be sparse data for the components that can be tested.

Last word of caution, I'd read what's available from Carl Schwarz at http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~popan/ before I assumed program Release was appropriate for the POPAN model. Given POPAN utilizes live encounter data, intuitively you could consider tests 1-3 (if you had sufficient data). Nonetheless, I'd check what the POPAN documentation has to say ... in addition to the mark manual.