Modelling paired release-recovery data in the presence of survival and capture heterogeneity with application to marked juvenile salmon

Products of multinomial models have been the standard approach to analysing animal release-recovery data. Two alternatives, a pseudo-likelihood model and a Bayesian nonlinear hierarchical model, are developed. Both approaches can to some degree account for heterogeneity in survival and capture probabilities over and above that accounted for by covariates. The pseudo-likelihood approach allows for recovery period specific overdispersion. The hierarchical approach treats survival and capture rates as a sum of fixed and random effects. The standard and alternative approaches were applied to a set of paired release-recovery salmon data. Marked juvenile chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) were released, with some recovered in freshwater as juveniles and others in marine waters as adults. Interest centered on modelling freshwater survival rates as a function of biological and hydrological covariates. Under the product multinomial formulation, most covariates were statistically significant. In contrast, under the pseudo-likelihood and hierarchical formulations, the standard errors for the coefficients were considerably larger, with pseudo-likelihood standard errors five to eight times larger, and fewer coefficients were statistically significant. Covariates, significant under all formulations, with important management implications included water temperature, water flow and amount of water exported for human use. The hierarchical model was considerably more stable with regard to estimated coefficients of training subsets used in a cross-validation.