EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Importance of accounting for phylogenetic dependence in multi-species mark–recapture studies

Fitsum Abadi, Christophe Barbraud, Dominique Besson, Joël Bried, Pierre-André Crochet, Karine Delord, Jaume Forcada, Vladimir Grosbois, Richard A. Phillips, Paul Sagar, Paul Thompson, Susan Waugh, Henri Weimerskirch, Andrew G. Wood and Olivier Gimenez

Ecological Modelling, 2014, vol. 273, issue C, 236-241

Abstract: Species in comparative demography studies often have a common phylogenetic or evolutionary ancestry and hence, they cannot fully be treated as independent samples in the statistical analysis. Although the serious implication of ignoring phylogeny has long been recognized, no attempt has been made so far to account for the lack of statistical independence due to phylogeny in multi-species mark–recapture comparative demography studies. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian hierarchical model that explicitly accounts for phylogenetic dependence among species, and to correct for imperfect detection, which is a common phenomenon in free-ranging species. We illustrate the method using individual mark–recapture data collected from 16 seabird species of the order Procellariiformes. Data on body mass and phylogeny of these species are compiled from literature. We investigate the relationship between adult survival and body mass with and without accounting for phylogeny. If we ignore phylogeny, we obtain a positive survival–body mass relationship. However, this relationship is no longer statistically significant once phylogenetic dependence is taken into account, implying that survival may actually depend on an unmeasured variable that is correlated with body mass due to a shared dependence on phylogeny. The proposed model allows the integration of multi-species mark–recapture data and phylogenetic information, and it is therefore a valuable tool in ecological and evolutionary biology.

Keywords: Bayesian hierarchical model; Comparative demography; Mark–recapture; Phylogeny; Procellariiformes; Survival probability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380013005656
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:273:y:2014:i:c:p:236-241

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2013.11.017

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Modelling is currently edited by Brian D. Fath

More articles in Ecological Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:273:y:2014:i:c:p:236-241