Hello,
I have modeled mark-recapture data using POPAN in RMark to estimate juvenile fish populations. A little background on the data and why we chose POPAN:
The data set consists of 25 years of mark recapture data on juvenile sturgeon. The project did not begin as a sturgeon project so the first few years had little to no sampling design. fishing occurred whenever they could wherever they could. the last 15 years were standardized to 5 months of the year with reduced sampling effort. The sampling area consisted of a 1 km drift. That being said some years of data are very sparse with little to no recaptures. For analysis I had to standardize the data which left even less data to work with (15 captures with 6 recaps for one year).
I could not consider the population to be closed for several reasons. Sampling occurred over several months and only in a 1 km stretch. From what we know about juvenile sturgeon they move all over the place. juveniles would have been moving in and out of the sampling area and new individuals would be moving in as well. movement is beneficial for the population but I cannot consider it closed. Model POPAN was chosen for this and the lack of data.
I initially ran the data with individual day capture histories but got questionable pop estimates with ridiculous confidence intervals for years with little data. I then re-ran all years with capture histories pooled into months for a total of 5. Pop estimates and CI's improved for some years but got worse for others. Some years were almost identical between daily and pooled ch while others were drastically different.
My main question is what should I consider to be more reliable (pooled or daily) when there are "good" and "bad" population estimates in both versions. Intuitively we think it should be pooled because there are far less parameters in the model than dailies with over 34 encounter histories and little to no recaptures. I have been told to consider a more robust design and to look at recaptures between years but I am looking for annual population estimates specifically.
Thank you in advance for the help.