Spatial var comp and max # of group covariates in MARK

[bglenn]

I'm a grad student at Oregon State University. I've been looking at spotted owl survival and weather/climate on 6 study areas in the PNW. I've run my models and am now looking at variance components for my top models. My weather/climate covariates vary both temporally and spatially (PRISM climate data), so I'm interested in both temporal and spatial variance components. I'm using the random effects models in MARK for temporal variance components, and I am following methods used by Franklin et al. (2000) and Olson et al. (2004) for spatial, where the first step in the spatial var comp analysis is to run a territory-specific survival model (phi(territory)p(best structure from my original model)). Because I have lots of territories (87-200+) that I'm coding as groups, I'm modifying my PIMs by editing the inp file using a text editor (too many pims to open in MARK), and running MARK in batch mode. For my study areas with fewer territories (e.g. 87), this process works fine! For areas with more territories (e.g >150). MARK gives me the following error:

"Not enough groups specified in capture history"

I've double checked my input files and there are the correct number of groups, so I suspect I reaching the limit of the number of groups that MARK can handle.

Is there a way to get MARK to read more groups??

Thanks for any suggestions!

Betsy

[bglenn]

Nevermind!!! I found 3 missing zeros in the group columns. Now Mark runs fine with lots of groups!

Betsy