fishStan

fishStan is an R package (R Core Team 2020) providing a collection of hierarchical Bayesian models written in the Stan language as called through RStan (Stan Development Team 2020). The package is a USGS software software release.

The purpose of the package is to document these models for use in USGS projects and allow easy discrimination. The package assumes the user is familiar with R and hierarchical models. Furthermore, fishStan assumes the user has advanced level-knowledge of these areas. The package is easier to use than compiling RStan models on ones own, but requires more technical skill than using functions such as lm() or glm(). fishStan users would also befit from understanding how RStan works because it relies upon that package and users may (and would befit!) from using RStan tools for model diagnostics such as rstan::traceplot() to understand if their model converged.