SPACECAP R package

SPACECAP is an experimental GUI-ization of the R code used in Royle et al. (2009). The package structure is described in Gopalaswamy et al. (2012).

07/17/2014: The new version of SPACECAP which is going to be uploaded to CRAN soon has some additional enhancements to the speed, minor updates to the code base, and some editing of the documentation. Thanks to Mike and Arjun for these changes.

04/24/2014:

Mike Meredith ( mmeredith@wcs.org ) was kind enough to invest a substantial amount of his time to make several useful modifications to the code. Right now the updated version of SPACECAP can be downloaded at the bottom of this page. You can source that file and just type from the command line:

> SPACECAP()

Main changes:

1. The previous version of SPACECAP had an arbitrary scaling of the 'sigma' parameter which made it inconsistent with 'secr' and not interpretable as the 'sigma' parameter of a bivariate normal density. [similarly, the 'sigma' scale parameter of the exponential model was not consistent]. This has been resolved. In general you should get consistent results with 'secr' now (to within the difference between Bayesian and likelihood inference).

2. The coordinate scaling has been done away with. SPACECAP now internally scales the coordinate system to lie within a box on [0,10] x [0,10]. The user should never see this or have to deal with it.

Important Note: Mike Meredith came up with a clever solution to accomodating a patchy habitat mask in BUGS while maintaining the continuous uniform prior for the activity centers. As this was one of the motivations behind the MCMC code base underlying SPACECAP, the use of Mike's solution may be advantageous. You can read his posting about this solution here:

http://mikemeredith.net/blog/1309_SECR_in_JAGS_patchy_habitat.htm

REFERENCES

Royle, J. A., Karanth, K. U., Gopalaswamy, A. M., & Kumar, N. S. (2009). Bayesian inference in camera trapping studies for a class of spatial capture-recapture models. Ecology, 90(11), 3233-3244.

Gopalaswamy, A. M., Royle, J. A., Hines, J. E., Singh, P., Jathanna, D., Kumar, N., & Karanth, K. U. (2012). Program SPACECAP: software for estimating animal density using spatially explicit capture–recapture models. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 3(6), 1067-1072.