Population Ecology Group, Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados, IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB), Miquel Marqués 21, 07190 Esporles, Mallorca, Spain.
Ecol Appl. 2011 Mar;21(2):555-64. doi: 10.1890/09-2339.1.
The frequency at which individuals breed is an important parameter in population, as well as in evolutionary, studies. However, when nonbreeding individuals are absent from the study area, the reproductive skipping is usually confounded with a recapture failure and cannot be estimated directly. Yet, there are situations in which external information may help to estimate reproductive skipping. Such a situation is found with nest-tenacious birds: the fact that an individual is not encountered in its previous nest is a good indication that it must be skipping reproduction. We illustrate here a general probabilistic framework in which we merged the classical individual capture-recapture information with nest-based information to obtain the simultaneous estimate of recapture, survival, reproductive skipping, and within-colony breeding dispersal probabilities using multi-event models. We applied this approach to Cory's Shearwater (Calonectris diomedea), a long-lived burrow-nesting seabird. By comparing results with those obtained from the analysis of the capture-recapture information alone, we showed that the model separates successfully the probabilities of recapture from those of temporal emigration. We found that the probabilities of future reproduction and breeding-site fidelity were lower for individuals temporarily absent from the colony, suggesting a lower intrinsic quality of intermittent breeders. The new probabilistic framework presented here allowed us to refine the estimates of demographic parameters by simply adding nest-based data, a type of information usually collected in the field but never included in the analysis of individual-based data. Our approach also provides a new and flexible way to test hypotheses on temporal emigration and breeding dispersal in longitudinal data.
个体繁殖频率是种群和进化研究中的一个重要参数。然而，当非繁殖个体不在研究区域内时，繁殖跳跃通常与重捕失败混淆，无法直接估计。然而，在某些情况下，外部信息可能有助于估计繁殖跳跃。这种情况发生在巢固执的鸟类中：个体在其先前的巢中未被发现，这表明它必须跳过繁殖。我们在这里展示了一个通用的概率框架，我们将经典的个体捕获-再捕获信息与基于巢的信息合并，使用多事件模型获得同时估计的再捕获、生存、繁殖跳跃以及殖民地内繁殖扩散概率。我们将这种方法应用于 Cory's Shearwater（Calonectris diomedea），一种长寿的穴居海鸟。通过将结果与仅从捕获-再捕获信息分析中获得的结果进行比较，我们表明该模型成功地将重捕概率与时间迁移概率区分开来。我们发现，暂时离开群体的个体未来繁殖和繁殖地点的忠诚度较低，这表明间歇性繁殖者的内在质量较低。这里提出的新概率框架允许我们通过简单地添加基于巢的信息来改进人口参数的估计，这种类型的信息通常在野外收集，但从未包含在基于个体的数据的分析中。我们的方法还为在纵向数据中测试关于时间迁移和繁殖扩散的假设提供了一种新的灵活方式。
