Hierarchical Modelling of Complex Ecological Data

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Ecological systems are complicated by the interplay of processes at distinct levels. Biological and environmental phenomena may affect entire communities, populations within a community, or individuals within a population, and these effects may also vary over time. Moreover, the difficulties in tracking individuals in the wild means that data from these systems are often collected by repeatedly observing marked individuals. In traditional mark-recapture experiments, animals individuals from the population are physically captured and marked with, for example, bands on a birds legs or tags in a fishes fin. More recently, scientists are relying on natural methods to identify individuals with pigmentation patterns that can be identified from photographs or genotype information available from DNA samples in skin, hair, or scat.