[Babase] Demography Notes Question for Jeanne, Susan, Karl,
and Leah
Susan Alberts
babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:20:17 -0500
In response to Catherine's questions:
>As I understand it, there are two basic scenarios that occur with
>the demography notes . . .
>
>1. Demography note date/group/sname consistent with a census record:
>In general, the objective here is to add additional notes to BaBase
>that otherwise wouldn't or couldn't be entered. Examples include
>the date an infant was first observed in the field or the first
>observed immigration date for a male. Demography notes are not
>given for deaths and male emigrations.
This is not necessarily true. There are sometimes demography notes
for deaths, and we hope there are always notes for disappearances and
emigrations.
> Because all the information in the demography note and the group
>census is consistent, this note is not really changing anything
>about how members is determined through Karl's programs (the same
>presence/absence and interpolation would be calculated with or
>without the demography note).
Yes this seems right.
>
>2. Demography note date/group/sname not consistent with a census record:
>In these cases, we have the opportunity to place an animal in a
>group (or list it as alone or with unknown group) based on "chance"
>observations. Examples here include a note on a male that visited a
>group after the group was censused or a note for male observed alone
>off in the distance while the team is monitoring a study group. The
>information in these notes will be putting additional info. in
>census and members that we wouldn't have if we relied on group
>censuses alone.
Yes this sounds correct.
>
>A stumbling block I'm having is how to decipher whether the
>information in the hand-written data warrants placing an animal in a
>group through demography notes. For instance, say the team is
>monitoring Viola's group and after the Viola census they observe
>Liberty interacting with group members. Since Liberty wasn't
>present at the time of the census, I don't want to simply add
>Liberty to the group through the demography note.
Did we decide that a male has to be considered a group member on any
day that he interacts with other group members? My recollection is
that we did this in order to allow those interactions to be valid.
Please refresh my memory and I will try to respond in more detail.
> So then would I list Liberty's group as unknown for that day by
>default and mention in the "notes" field that he joined late and
>interacted?
Again, I need my memory refreshed about whether we currently have
rules about this. It seems to me that we don't want to introduce a
lot of "unknown" days for a male artificially when he probably just
went straight from one group to another. i can't see anything about
this written in current babase documentation...
> And what if the team mentions something specific, like Liberty
>joined Viola's from Omo's . . . is that enough to justify placing
>Liberty in Omo's even if I don't have any other information on Omo's
>group for that day?
I think yes but will have to think more after you refresh my memory
about current rules.
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Susan Alberts, Associate Professor
Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, Durham NC 27708
phone 919-660-7272 fax 919-660-7293