Dear all,

I want to asses the efectiveness of temporary fencing on an endangered plant population. I have three 100 m2 plots subdivided in 100 subplots of 1 m2. I have counted, in each subplot, the total number of individuals of a plant species, and I repeated the sampling 7 years. Because of the small size of the population, we used the BACI metodology (Before After Control Impact). One of the plots were fenced during flowering season (Impact) and the other ones were used as controls. The census has been conducted since one year before the fencing (Before) until 2020 (After).

The resulting count data has a large amount of zeros and has temporal and spatial correlation. Therefore, I have chosen Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) to analize the efect of the fencing in the population. I have used the glmmTMB package, here is my model, where time and fence are fixed factors:

model = glmmTMB(totalcount~timefactor +fencefactor+ (1|site), data=mydata, family=nbinom2)

Does this model capture what I'm trying to assess (Does fencing have an effect on the population?) ?

I would be thankful to all replies.

Thank you and best regards