Pooling capture occasions and encounter history file

[JonL]

I suspect that I eventually will decide to pool some capture occasions in my analysis. Can I first create an encounter history file for MARK (in my particular case I plan to use the "Robust design") and at a later stage decide which occasions to pool. That would be very convenient. Or should I plan to decide this before I prepare the encounter history (INP) file? Which, I suspect means, I will end up with a jumble of files. (Yes somebody, you got it right, if this capability is not there, take it as an idea for a future version).

Jon Loman

[cooch]

I suspect that I eventually will decide to pool some capture occasions in my analysis. Can I first create an encounter history file for MARK (in my particular case I plan to use the "Robust design") and at a later stage decide which occasions to pool. That would be very convenient. Or should I plan to decide this before I prepare the encounter history (INP) file? Which, I suspect means, I will end up with a jumble of files. (Yes somebody, you got it right, if this capability is not there, take it as an idea for a future version).

Jon Loman

No, not easily done, if by pooling you mean taking encounters over multiple intervals and treating them as if they were one sampling occasion (although you could sort of trick MARK into getting there using a robust design approach with particular constraints - i.e., have MARK treat the encounters you want to pool as secondary samples within a primary sample) - but there would be ugly issues with handling the time intervales between primary occasions correctly.

And, adding this capability means adding data manipulation capabilities to MARK - see my reply to your earlier post about this.

[cschwarz@stat.sfu.ca]

The package POPAN (www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~popan) has these capabilties. You can use POPAN to manipulate your data and create the relevant histories.

Remi Choquet also has a package (UCARE) for manipulating histories (e.g. pooling and selecting). Visit
Choquet R., Reboulet A-M., Lebreton J-D., Gimenez O., Pradel R.
(2005). U-CARE 2.2 User?s Manual. CEFE, Montpellier, France.
( http://www.cefe.cnrs.fr/BIOM/En/softwares.htm ).