Introduction to Program MARK

[Melanie Colón]

The Program MARK Workshop, hosted by The Tributary Group, LLC, and the Department of Natural Resource Management at South Dakota State University, will be held at the Swiftel Center in Brookings, SD, 14-18 March 2016.

This introductory-level workshop will provide biologists and graduate students with the basic background to understand the mainstream analyses performed by Program MARK. A mixture of lectures and laboratory exercises will be provided. Participants will learn the basics of parameter estimation with likelihood theory, model selection with Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), and the binomial and mulitnomial distributions. Models to be covered include:
Known Fate
Nest Success
Cormack Jolly Seber
Multi-State
Joint Live and Dead models

The clientele for this workshop are biologists and graduate students that have some or limited prior experience with Program MARK and will need to estimate abundance or vital rates from mark-recapture data in the near future.

Instructor - Dr. Darryl MacKenzie. Darryl is an internationally renowned biometrician, particularly for his work on the development and application of species occurrence models. He has over 15 years of experience in applying statistical techniques to ecological and environmental situations, starting at the University of Otago, and then progressing to North Carolina State University (based at USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center) in 2000, before commencing full-time with Proteus in 2001. Darryl has provided advice on studies for a wide-range of species and enjoys the challenge of combining the statistical theory with the practical realities to develop a pragmatic solution.

Salary: Registration cost for the 5-day workshop is $1,050. This fee includes course materials, facilities for the workshop, lunch Monday through Thursday, and morning and afternoon refreshments.

Qualifications: To register, please visit http://thetributaryg...t/program-mark/. Please direct questions to Dr. Troy W. Grovenburg.

Website: http://thetributaryg...t/program-mark/

Contact: Dr. Troy W. Grovenburg, troy.grovenburg@sdstate.edu, 605-688-5064