Bayesian Population Analysis using WinBUGS: A Hierarchical Perspective

Highly recommend, regularly read, and frequently loaned out. This is an excellent book, with tons of example code and clearly written, easy to follow text. I lost track of the number of times I've reached for this book over the last year, and adapted code for my own purposes. It's not the sort of book you read cover to cover, but hit up chapters as you start thinking about how to implement things in your own research.It's worth highlighting that though it says 'WinBUGS' on the cover, everything in there applies to OpenBUGS and JAGS as well. I don't know about STAN because I'm not a stan user. But you're not locked into a dying ecosystem as WinBUGS fades away.

This book covers examples of fairly complex models (at least for the average ecologist), and ways to analyze them in a Bayesian framework. I found this particularly useful for mark-recapture analysis. Full code is provided for every example, which I found could be easily modified to fit my own data in several cases (although I still had to do some heavy lifting in many instances). I think this book, together with Royle and Dorazio, and McCarthy, is a nice addition to the library of the ecologist interested in implementing Bayesian analysis, but who may not be at the level of coding a Jolly-Seber model (insert other examples here) unassisted. The chapter on integrated population models alone made this book worth the money for me (I haven't seen this type of modeling presented more clearly anywhere else). Well done, and thanks to the authors for their contribution to ecologists.

I don't normally write reviews for books on Amazon but having purchased both of Kery's books on Bayesian analysis and having read several others I have to say these two books are the best for anyone working on wildlife and ecology. They lead you through the basics of running analyses and yet get to some pretty complex analyses in an easily understandable way. For an ecologist trying to teach themselves bayesian statistics these are excellent. The Bayesian population analysis using Winbugs book take you through bayesian analyses of estimating population abundance as well as determination of population dynamics such as birth and death rates using freely available Winbugs and R software. It shows you how to analyse hierarchical models that factor in detection probability in the observation process in winbugs in a much more easily understandable way than Andy Royle's book. Both Kery's books were definitely worth buying and I keep returning to them

Essential for ecologists interested in occupancy modeling. Helped me code in R for my thesis.

Very in depth, with examples of code. So far so good!

Excellent book. Clearly written. Much useful code. This is one the most valuable resources on my desk

Amazing book. It is an essential book for all ecologists.

I highly recommend this book if you are interested in learning Bayesian analysis and/or Winbugs. Similar to Kery's first book, Introduction to Winbugs for Ecologists, this book is a gentle introduction to common (yet advanced!) modeling techniques written for those who are new to modeling and statistics. The introductory chapters are especially useful for understanding how Bayesian analysis and model based statistics can be a more intuitive framework compared to traditional statistics that are taught in class. What makes this book so valuable is that the authors spend each chapter building up from the simplest form of a model to its most complex iteration. Because of this, it's actually been possible to figure out how to analyze my own data!

I've just started using this book to help with some of my Bayesian Analysis and I would highly recommend it. It is very clear, concise and easy to follow and explains basic concepts so it is open to pretty much anyone with some (even very little) statistical background.The fact that all of their code for both R and winBUGS is printed within the book is great as it means you can easily go through their examples, pick them apart - and then adapt the code for your own modelling needs.

Another excellent book on Bayesian estimation using Winbugs within the R statistical environment. This is a far more technical and focussed book than his previous (superb) introduction to Winbugs, as it concerns his main research area of population estimation. But, as Witt the previous book, it makes complex ideas accessible. If you are a population ecologist, read it - I'm jot even s population ecologist but I found it an excellent general bridge between introductory Bayesian analysis and more complex models.

It is well written and describes things from scratch with very good examples. I think it is a really good book for self-study Bayesian, in general, random effect /hierarch models, in particular.