Robust design and secondary sessions

questions concerning analysis/theory using program MARK

Robust design and secondary sessions

Postby mhollanders » Fri Aug 16, 2019 11:23 pm

Good day,

I am part of a frog monitoring project where we are using the robust design to answer questions about survival between diseased and non-diseased individuals. We go four times in the active season (spring-fall), and each primary sessions consist of three nights (secondary sessions). I would like to know if the study design could be improved by increasing the number of primary sessions and reducing the number of secondary sessions to just two nights instead of three. Is there a way to determine how many secondary sessions one should perform within a primary session? Is this related to getting sufficient recaptures?

Kind regards,
Matt
mhollanders
 
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Aug 15, 2019 9:21 pm

Re: Robust design and secondary sessions

Postby jhines » Tue Aug 20, 2019 7:27 am

Hi Matt,

I think the best way to address your question would be to simulate (or generate expected-value) data under one study design and analyze the simulated data using Mark (or better yet, RMark). Then repeat the process with a different study-design (eg., 2 nights) and analyze that dataset. If simulating data, repeat the process many times, then compare the average estimates of survival and standard errors to see if the estimates from the reduced secondary-period sampling is acceptable. It looks like you're interested in the difference between diseased vs non-diseased survival, so you'd look at the difference in survival estimates from the two study-designs.

Jim
jhines
 
Posts: 599
Joined: Fri May 16, 2003 9:24 am
Location: Laurel, MD, USA


Return to analysis help

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests