This R package implements the Capwire population size estimators developed by Craig Miller, Paul Joyce and Lisette Waits (paper here). They were designed for non-invasive genetic samplings which is different than standard mark-recapture surveys in that the same individual can be detected multiple times (often many times) in the same sampling session. Details on the estimators can be found in the original paper.

This package is the collaborative work of Matthew Pennell, Carisa Stansbury, Lisette Waits, and Craig Miller. The package is described in this paper.

To install the package directly from github, the easiest way is to install using devtools. Install devtools, then type

library(devtools)
install_github("mwpennell/capwire")

We have written a tutorial documenting how the various functions can be used. This is also available as a supplement to the Pennell et al. paper.

In the tutorial we describe a method for partitioning the data into subsets in order to improve population size estimation when a few individuals were overrepresented in the dataset. We intended to describe the method in detail in a subsequent publication. However, we came across some statistical issues in applying this approach and are currently working on solving these. For the time being, the functions fitTirmPartition and partitionCountData have been removed from the current package. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please feel free to contact us ([email protected]) if you have any questions about this.