News

This is a space for bits and pieces that come up from time to time.

2 February 2012

A 3-day short course will be run in May under the auspices of the Columbia Mountains Institute:

Short course on capture-recapture methods for spatial data
Location: Nelson, British Colombia
Dates: 29–31 May 2012
Instructor: Murray Efford
Cost: CND$675 + tax

See www.cmiae.org for more.

22 December 2011

secr 2.3.1 has significant new features that almost qualify it as a full version. Learned response models (trap happiness, trap shyness) may now be specific to a particular site. As before, the effect comes in both a permanent ('bk') and a transient ('Bk') flavour. 

The new function 'RMarkInput' makes it easy to send secr data to MARK. This will be expanded later to include groups and covariates.

21 November 2011

secr 2.3.0, out today, has new capability for density surfaces as described in a vignette (secr-densitysurfaces.pdf). Users may define their own surface model as an R function, and functions ‘predictDsurface’, ‘plot.Dsurface’ and ‘spotHeight’ make for easy plotting. ‘addCovariates’ simplifies the extraction of spatial covariates from another spatial data source for use in a density model.

A bug in secr version 2.2.0 and earlier prevented the fitting of models to data from exclusive detectors ('multi', 'polygonX', 'transectX') when the models included detector-level covariates. This has been fixed.

11 October 2011

This link has been down for some time. The latest news is the release of secr 2.2.0 early this month.  Work on the next version is underway: it already includes density models with covariates spanning multiple sessions (see query from Frank van Manen on phidot) and provision for negative habitat masks (i.e. polygons defining nonhabitat rather than habitat areas). Contact Murray offline if you would like access to a beta version with these capabilities.

Murray Efford

University of Otago DENSITY: software for spatially explicit capture-recapture