Description

In this lesson, students will be introduced to mark-recapture and tagging methods that scientists use worldwide to determine population sizes and habitat usage of a wide variety of animals. One of the species that scientists are interested in using these methods on is the American Shad, a once prominent fish throughout the Atlantic Ocean that has seen its numbers decrease in recent years.   Using data obtained from a recently published study, students will examine the survival rates of American shad when tested with 3 different forms of internal tagging methods.  To examine these survival rates, students will be introduced to survival analysis and the Cox proportional hazards model.  Then, using this model in R, focal paper statistics and survival graphs will be recreated to show the effects that certain variables have on the survival of American shad in this study.  

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