Non-breeding individuals in Pradel fecundity models

[Tom.B]

Hi again all,

I'm after a little advice about the best way to correct Pradel fecundity models for non-breeding juveniles.

I have robust design data for 3 sites and 3 years, with 4 sessions per year (spring, summer, autumn, winter) and 4 or 5 secondary sessions in each.

My study organism (a mouse) has a breeding season whereby almost all recruitment occurs between the summer-autumn and autumn-winter trapping sessions. I'm primarily interested in comparing survival and fecundity between sites, and secondarily possible survival differences between sexes.

I've been running some preliminary RDPdfHuggins models to estimate survival and fecundity, which seem to be working well (thanks Jeff!). However, the fecundity estimates are not very realistic for the autumn-winter periods, because the autumn populations are swollen by non-reproductive juveniles of the year (field data suggests that year-old adults are essentially all reproductively active and young of the year are all non-reproductive).

Is there a sensible way for producing or correcting autumn-winter recruitment rates such that they reflect the population size in the summer rather than the autumn or ignore animals caught as juveniles in the autumn?

Cheers,
Tom

EDIT - sorry, just realised this would probably be better off in Analysis & Design.

[Tom.B]

I suppose I could simply re-run the final models without the autumn trapping data to give summer-winter f values, unless anyone has a better idea?