Thomas Stanley, Ph.D. (Former Employee)

No abstract available.

Nest predation, the major cause of nest failure in passerines, has exerted a strong influence on the evolution of life history traits of birds. Because human disturbance during nest monitoring may alter predation rates, we investigated whether human scent affected the survival of artificial ground nests in shortgrass prairie. Our experiment consisted of two treatments, one in which there...

A new, fully efficient goodness-of-fit test for the time-specific closed-population capture-recapture model Mt is presented. This test is based on the residual distribution of the capture history data given the maximum likelihood parameter estimates under model Mt, is partitioned into informative components, and is based on chi-square statistics. Comparison of this test with Leslie's...

The assumption of demographic closure in the analysis of capture-recapture data under closed-population models is of fundamental importance. Yet, little progress has been made in the development of omnibus tests of the closure assumption. We present a closure test for time-specific data that, in principle, tests the null hypothesis of closed-population model M(t) against the open...

For valid statistical inference, it is important to select an appropriate statistical model. In the analysis of capture-recapture data under the closed-population models of Otis et al. (1978), information theoretic and hypothesis testing approaches to model selection are not practical, because some of the models have likelihoods with nonidenti- fiable parameters. A further problem is...

Specification of an appropriate model is critical to valid statistical inference. Given the “true model” for the data is unknown, the goal of model selection is to select a plausible approximating model that balances model bias and sampling variance. Model selection based on information criteria such as AIC or its variant AICc, or criteria like CAIC, has proven useful in a variety of...