I am interested in identifying sex-specific survival rates. I have a long-term dataset of individually marked birds from one breeding colony. Of these, I am able to genetically sex a subset. Additionally, I have access to mark-recapture data on nearby breeding colonies and so can estimate emigration from my target breeding colony. However, I am only able to sex individuals from my focal breeding colony.

My research project addresses both survival and dispersal (permanent emigration). So I'd like to disentangle these as much as possible and look at effects of sex. One approach is to only model the subset of birds I'm able to sex. Another approach would be to model all individuals, including unknown sex, and apply the techniques in Nichols et al. (2004) to apply probabilities of "male or female" to unknown-sex birds (I may be summarizing that poorly).

Can I use a multi-site model if I only include individuals marked on one colony, but do have data for permanent emigration to other colonies? Would it make sense to use a multi-site model with all individuals from all colonies but only have sex information from one colony?

Thanks in advance!

Nichols, J.D., Kendall, W.L., Hines, J.E. and Spendelow, J.A. 2004. Estimation of sex‐specific survival from capture–recapture data when sex is not always known. Ecology 85(12):3192-3201.

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