Capture-Recapture Smooth Estimation of Age-Specific Survival Probabilities in Animal Populations

Yielding sound estimates of survival according to age in wild populations where senescence or other age-related variations may occur is very important to management decision makers, and remains challenging. This paper proposes to use penalized maximum likelihood to obtain smooth estimates of annual survival probabilities across age in populations of wild animals followed by capture–recapture. We propose to use two different types of smoothing penalties, and we use ν-fold cross-validation to select the best value of the tuning parameter for the intensity of smoothing. We then assess the accuracy of the method by a simulation study with two different shapes of the relationship between age and survival, and we conclude that a careful use of this method provides reliable noise-free estimates of age-specific annual survival. We apply this procedure to the motivating data from a population of roe deer known to exhibit a marked decrease of survival with age, and we compare our results with those previously published on this population.