Hi Eric,

Thanks for your interest in MGET. Unfortunately we haven’t found funding to produce more complete documentation, which would include a tutorial. It sounds like you are interested in habitat modeling. You can find some worked examples of habitat models here.

There is both a presence/absence model and a density model. These examples are a bit more complicated than most people need because they implement a two-stage approach that is common with “distance sampling” or “density surface modeling” methodology. In the first stage, sightings from a line transect survey are used to model how the probability of making a sighting decreases with the distance to the sighting. This model is called a “detection function”. In the second stage, a regression model (e.g. a GAM) is used to relate presence or number of animals sighted to environmental covariates.

Unless you are using distance sampling methodology for your abalone analysis, it is likely that you’re mainly interested in the second stage of the example. But because there are a considerable number of steps involved, the example is actually split into 7 stages or so, each with sub-stages inside. Hopefully you won’t be intimidated by the large number of ArcGIS models you need to run through. The core statistical workflow is shown here, if you want to get a quick idea.  Feel free to ask questions.

Best,

Jason

From: [mailto:] On Behalf Of Eric Ostrowski
Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2017 12:50 PM
To:
Subject: [mget-help] MGET Tutorial