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Welcome to the dsm wiki!

dsm is a package to model the spatial distribution of animals using data collected from a distance sampling (amongst others) survey. DSM stands for density surface model, though we often use such models to calculate abundance the name has stuck.

dsm is an R package and is designed to be used with mrds or Distance.

Getting started

• Paper: Spatial models for distance sampling data: recent developments and future directions (open access!)
• Example analyses
• For how to get your data into the correct format to use with dsm, see ?"dsm-data"
• Problems? For advice about DSM analyses and survey methodology try the distance sampling e-mail list. If you think you've found a bug in dsm, you can report it on github.
• (in)frequently asked questions -- record of answers to questions I have received via e-mail that may be of more general interest.

Known issues/problems

• ## Warning: matrix not positive definite messages
• Error in if (x0[i] == 0) 1 else x0[i] : missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed message when using dsm.var.prop or dsm.var.gam

Getting the latest version of dsm

CRAN only allows packages to be updated infrequently (due to them having to be checked by hand). I often make fixes more frequently (and then often forget to update the CRAN package).

To ensure you have the latest version of dsm, install devtools:

install.packages("devtools")

then install dsm from github:

library(devtools)
install_github("dsm","DistanceDevelopment")

Then you have a shiny new version of dsm on your computer.