Some struggles

[Bryan Hamilton]

Its been over 10 years since I took the course on MARK in Fort Collins and RTFM. So I am rusty and I never really grasped a lot of material, like PIMS and Design Matrices. I'm not very skilled. I made the jump to R for most of my statistical analyses and graphing and decided that I should use RMark, its got to be easier than MARK. Well I'm still really struggling. I have several dissertation chapters that are based on mark recapture data so I need to learn this stuff. Getting to it...

1. I've done several RMark tutorials. They are mostly over my head. I can get my data to run but I'm not really mastering what I'm doing. Any recommendations of more tutorials to work through would be appreciated.

2. How do I constrain parameters? In MARK is was a drop down menu to make Pi=Ci. I'm not sure how to code this RMark.

3. How do I add individual co-variates to a formula specification (ie Huggins Model)? One of the reasons I wanted to use RMark was the formula based code that I thought would be easier but I still haven't grasped the formula specification.

I know these are specific questions and I apologize if I'm breaking forum ettiquetee. I'm not complaining about RMark, the package is incredible. I'm just feeling overwhelmed at its complexity. There are so many packages out there (secr, marked, unmarked) that all have pretty steep learning curves. I really want to learn RMark and I'm willing to put in the time.

[jlaake]

I've addressed this offlist. I'll be posting a revision of the workshop notes in a couple of weeks that addresses some of these and other questions that occur.

--jeff