R package releases - dht2 important information

[Laura Marshall]

Dear Distance Users,

We are pleased to announce the imminent release of the Distance 1.0.7 and mrds 2.2.8 R packages on CRAN .

Distance 1.0.7 has been accepted to CRAN and this version will be available for installation on all platforms shortly. We would like to highlight a change in Distance which is relevant to dht2 users. It is now a requirement that the data passed to dht2 has an object ID field named 'object', if this is missing you will now get an error message. Further details and example code of how to add this to your data can be found at:

http://distancesampling.org/blog/2022/11/16/distance-r-package-updates

mrds 2.2.8 has been submitted to CRAN and we hope it will be available early next week. There have been a number of bug fixes in both packages, and we recommend that users update to the latest versions as they become available.

The full list of changes are detailed below:

Distance

Changes in version 1.0.7 (accepted to CRAN 16/11/2022)

-   dht2 now requires the object field in flatfile formatted data. The following vignette shows how to add an object field if your data does not have already have one: https://examples.distancesampling.org/Distance-cameratraps/camera-distill.html

-   Fix bugs when a uniform is fitted with no adjustments (#129 / #130)

-   Fixed error in dht2 when binned data used distend / distbegin (#142) 

mrds

Changes in version 2.2.8 (submitted to on CRAN 16/11/2022)

-   Fix bug where plotting rem.fi models when truncation was used would lead to an error being thrown. (#58) 

-   Fix bugs when a uniform is fitted with no adjustments (#59)

-   Fix bug in plotting when left truncation was used and points didn't match detection function line (Distance #134) 

-   Fix bug in debug reporting when uniform only models are used (Distance #136) 

-   Fix bug in adjustment term fitting where width scaling was defined as right minus left truncation, rather than just the right truncation value (Distance #133) 

-   Use (0,width) as the interval for monotonicity checks, rather than (left, width) as this was causing issues and is not consistent with Distance for Windows (Distance #135) 

-   Expose mono.outer.iter option to control number of outer iterations used to fit a monotonic model. Default 200.

-   Make dht output tables consistent. Now always refers to Region in the display (rather than Region in summary and Label in N/D tables). Note this is only a display change so won't break code which looks to extract these values based on column names from the dht object which is unchanged.(#5)

-   Fixed bug leading to erroneous zero totals in individuals N/D tables when there were no sightings in one or more strata. Bug was apparent when the data were sightings of clusters and the varflag 1 option (er_method = 1 in Distance ds function) was selected in the dht function.(#61) 

Best wishes,

Laura

Dr. L Marshall

Distance Devleopment Team

Centre for Research into Ecological & Environmental Modelling

University of St. Andrews

Tel: +44 (0)1334 461808

Please note that my core working hours are now concentrated between 9am Tuesday and 1pm Thursday. There may be a delay in my response to E-mails outwith these times.