Estimation and effects of tag-misread rates in capture-recapture studies

Virtually all capture-recapture studies assume that tags are read properly when an animal is captured. However, the animals in resighting studies are often not handled, tags are read at a distance, and misreads can occur. In this paper, we develop a simple model to account for misreads, assess the impact of misreads upon estimates of survival and catchability, and analyze a set of data from resightings of previously branded seals. In general, unless survival, capture, and misread rates are relatively high, most studies have poor power to detect misreads and estimates of survival are not severely biased. Estimates of capture rates will be biased downwards and will tend to estimate the product of the original capture rate and the complement of the misread rate.

[1]  B. Manly.  Randomization, Bootstrap and Monte Carlo Methods in Biology , 2018 .

[2]  Kenneth H. Pollock,et al.  CAPTURE-RECAPTURE STUDIES FOR MULTIPLE STRATA INCLUDING NON-MARKOVIAN TRANSITIONS , 1993 .

[3]  K. Liang,et al.  Asymptotic Properties of Maximum Likelihood Estimators and Likelihood Ratio Tests under Nonstandard Conditions , 1987 .

[4]  G. Seber.  A NOTE ON THE MULTIPLE-RECAPTURE CENSUS. , 1965, Biometrika.

[5]  Carl J. Schwarz,et al.  Estimation of juvenile survival, adult survival, and age-specific pupping probabilities for the female grey seal (Halichoerus gryprus) on Sable Island from capture-recapture data , 2000 .

[6]  Roger Pradel,et al.  Competing events, mixtures of information and multistratum recapture models , 1999 .

[7]  Kenneth H. Pollock,et al.  Design and Analysis Methods for Fish Survival Experiments Based on Release-Recapture. , 1988 .

[8]  C. Schwarz,et al.  ESTIMATING TEMPORARY MIGRATION USING THE ROBUST DESIGN , 1997 .

[9]  J. Nichols,et al.  Statistical inference for capture-recapture experiments , 1992 .

[10]  Roger Pradel,et al.  CAPTURE-RECAPTURE SURVIVAL MODELS TAKING ACCOUNT OF TRANSIENTS , 1997 .

[11]  Carl J. Schwarz,et al.  Estimating migration rates using tag-recovery data , 1993 .

[12]  R. Davies.  Hypothesis testing when a nuisance parameter is present only under the alternative , 1977 .

[13]  G. Jolly.  EXPLICIT ESTIMATES FROM CAPTURE-RECAPTURE DATA WITH BOTH DEATH AND IMMIGRATION-STOCHASTIC MODEL. , 1965, Biometrika.

[14]  R. Cormack.  Estimates of survival from the sighting of marked animals , 1964 .

[15]  David R. Anderson,et al.  Modeling Survival and Testing Biological Hypotheses Using Marked Animals: A Unified Approach with Case Studies , 1992 .

[16]  Paul H. Garthwaite,et al.  Quantifying Precision of Mark-Recapture Estimates Using the Bootstrap and Related Methods , 1991 .