Hi,
I am part of a lab group that has been conducting mark-recapture surveys of the same population of butterflies for 4 years. The population has increased substantially (about 20-fold) over the course of the 4 years, and we are interested in examining how home range size has changed from year to year, similar to what was done with the oven bird data in the Efford et al. 2015 paper. However, within each session, the population is open. The flight period and capture session lasted for about 6 weeks each year, but each butterfly only lives for approximately 2 weeks max. Most butterflies emerge during the middle of the season, so that we have a peak of detections in the middle and fewer detections at the start and end of each session. Since we are violating the closure assumption, would a comparison of home range sizes across years still be valid? Do you have any suggestions for dealing with this type of data (e.g. possibly truncating the early and late occasions for each session)?
Each survey consisted of searching the study area on foot, and capturing all butterflies encountered using nets, so we are using a polygon detector type. We have a decent-size data set, with >1900 detections over 4 years.
Thanks,
Becky