POPAN & GOF

[TimvdS89]

Hello,

I am currently working on some data collected over a 4 year period, within which I use only 4 months per year, giving me 16 occasions to work with. I want to estimate the population abundance, and therefore opted for the POPAN model. The model gave me some estimates for the abundance, however, when testing the best fitting model (a time-dependent model in this case), the GOF I get from RELEASE are p-level = 0 for both TEST2 and TEST3, which would mean I am violating the assumptions of equal catchability & equal survivability. To adjust for the lack-of-fit I would need a c-hat of roughly 7.9 - which is by all means unreasonable I believe.

Also when trying U-CARE do I get p-levels of zero.

I am not sure what I can do about this. I think the problem is that I have too many transient animals in my population, but I do not know how to account for this? Should I leave out the animals that have only been seen once? Is perhaps the model I am applying not the correct one? Perhaps a very 'broad' question; but I am relatively unsure how to proceed from here.

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

Kind regards,
Tim