www.phidot.org

Hi,
I read in the package manual that multi-state robust designs are implementable by defining secondary and primary periods, and fixing real parameters Phi and Psi =1 during secondary periods. Does this means that further parameters (abundance within primary periods and temporary migration rates) may be added to and estimated by the model? Are there any working examples explaining the code for implementing such a model in marked?
Thanks,
ricardo

Although it is typically used for abundance estimation, the concept of robust design is more general than that and simply implies that secondary sampling intervals are so close together that you can assume some level of closure to improve paramter precision. Jolly-Seber is the only model currently in marked that provides estimates of aabundance. All of the statistics are available to you so you could compute them based on Horvitz-Thompson approach. However if your primary interest is abundance, I suggest using RMark with MARK. Your options for models is much broader. My focus in marked is survival.