Hello, I studied the effect of a hurricane in Cozumel on understory birds. I have bird abundances (i.e. counts) registered always on the SAME six sites (i.e. blocks). I have data for: before the hurricane, first year after the hurricane, second year after the hurricane. I each of these time periods, I also have data for summer season and for winter season. I do not have a balanced design, in one of the time periods I only have data for 5 of the six sites, and for another period I only have data for 3 of the six sites. I am defining Poisson error distrubution for the response variable. I am using 'glmer' with two fixed factors, and I am interested in their interaction: - factor hurricane (three levels: before, after 1 y, after 2 y) - factor season (two levels: summer, winter) I am also specifying a random factor (sites), and I am specifying the nested structure of the design. However, I don't know if I am specifying the random part of the model in the correct way; this is what I am doing: abundance ~ hurricane*season + (1|site/hurricane/season)
I have three questions: 1. Is the random part specified correctly? 2. How do I check for overdispersion, and how can I correct for it? (for each site I only have one observation; sites are my replicates) 3. How do I make the following comparisons: I am interested in testing for each season separately, after 1 y vs. before the hurricane, and after 2 years vs. before the hurricane. Thank you so much! Ellen Andresen UNAM-Mexico ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.