Journal Article

BaSTA: an R package for Bayesian estimation of age-specific survival from incomplete mark-recapture/recovery data with covariates

Colchero, F., Jones, O. R., Rebke, M.
Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 3:3, 466–470 (2012)

Abstract

1. Understanding age-specific survival in wild animal populations is crucial to the study of population dynamics and is therefore an essential component of several fields including evolution, management, and conservation. 2. We present BaSTA, a free open-source software package for estimating age-specific survival from capture-recapture/recovery data under a Bayesian framework. 3. The method copes with low recapture probabilities, unknown ages (e.g. due to left-truncation) and unknown ages at death (e.g. due to right-censoring). It estimates survival and detection parameters as well as the unknown birth and death times (i.e. latent states) while allowing users to test a range of survival models. In addition, the effect of continuous or categorical covariates can be evaluated. 4. This tool facilitates the analysis of age patterns of survival in long-term animal studies and will enable researchers to robustly infer the effect of covariates, even with large amounts of missing data.
Keywords: World, statistics
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.