I have 4 populations that have been studied for ~21 years each. Typically when an individual moves between two populations (e.g., population A and B) I have migrated the encounter history from A to B. However, now I am wondering if it is more appropriate to leave the encounter history from A alone and start a new encounter in B for said individuals. These movements over the long term have been simple movements (e.g., straying) and not effective dispersal (e.g., breeding).
So my questions are:
1) do I continue to move individual encounter histories between A and B?
2) do I leave the individual in each A and B, with encounters unique to those populations?
3) do I start a new encounter for the individual in A and remove it's old encounter from B (using -1;)
Hopefully I have explained my issue sufficiently.