Modeling age and nest-specific survival using a hierarchical Bayesian approach.

摘要: Recent studies have shown that grassland birds are declining more rapidly than any other group of terrestrial birds. Current methods estimating avian age-specific nest survival rates require knowing the ages nests, assuming homogeneous nests in terms rates, or treating hazard function as a piecewise step function. In this article, we propose Bayesian hierarchical model with nest-specific covariates to estimate daily probabilities without above requirements. The provides smooth curve and identifies factors related survival. can handle irregular visiting schedules it has least restrictive assumptions compared existing methods. Without proportional hazards, use multinomial semiparametric logit specify direct relation between failure probability covariates. An intrinsic autoregressive prior is employed for age effect. This nonparametric flexible alternative parametric assumptions. computation efficient because full conditional posterior distributions either closed forms log concave. We method analyze Missouri dickcissel dataset find (1) not during nesting period, reaches its lowest at transition from incubation nestling; (2) grass cover vegetation height study area.