Chapter 9 - Estimation of Survival and Movement from Capture–Recapture Data Using Multistate Models

Abstract

Data on the encounter of marked individuals convey information not only about their survival but also about their “state”, for example, the location of encounter, whether they reproduce, whether they have a disease, etc. Often, there is an interest in estimating state-dependent survival and transition probabilities among states. Transitions may have a different meaning depending on the state definition. A transition may denote the movement among sites, the recruitment into the breeding segment of a population, or the event of becoming infected. In this chapter, we show how multistate capture–recapture models can be implemented in BUGS using a state-space formulation. We also illustrate an array of different multistate models and emphasize their great flexibility. Indeed, multistate capture–recapture models are an extremely general class of models, and the Cormack–Jolly–Seber, mark-recovery, and Jolly–Seber models can all be seen as special cases.