This question references the Kery and Royle textbook, "Applied Hierarchical Modeling in Ecology", Volume 1.
I am trying to apply open HDS models to a 20 year point transect distance data set collected on Hawaii amakihi birds. Right now I am wrangling the data so it matches the way they are set up in the book, where they demonstrate applying the model to scrub jay data. Where I am encountering a problem is with the "y" matrix (pg 517) of distance class frequencies. For the simulated scrub jay data, there is only 1 detection per site per year, which makes it easy to set up the matrix; however, unlike the simulated data, I sometimes have multiple detections of different individuals at different distances per site, per year. So, I'm not sure the proper way to incorporate all of the information into the "y" matrix of distance class frequencies. My first thought was to simply add all of the individuals and average the distances, but i'm not sure how that would affect subsequent variability estimates or if that is an acceptable practice at all.