Thanks to all of you who have answered! If your favorite software isn't 
here, please let me know.

//Peter

-------- Original Message --------

It depends on what types of questions you are wanting to ask and what 
forms your data are in.  MARK is a great place to start, since you can 
access most of the other stand-alone software through the MARK 
interface.  I would consider using POPAN (via the MARK interface), 
provided your data fit the appropriate models.  Another package to 
consider is M-SURGE, which belongs to the U-SURGE/ECARE cluster of 
programs.  It's a bit more troublesome to work with, and results aren't 
published as much.  If you find any others that look promising, please 
do forward them along - I'd be quite interested to see!

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Hi, i think that you have to know what you want to do. Mark is a
good software that i used to study population dynamic on subantarctic
seabirds. For basic study it is enough but it seems that m-surge is better
for multi-state study. if you want to download the programme you should
find it at the web site: http://www.cefe.cnrs.fr/BIOM/en/softwares.htm. I
will also give you the adress to download a paper of Lebreton:
http://www.cefe.cnrs.fr/pdf/Lebreton-EcoMonog-1992.pdf. It can be useful
when you start with Mark-recapture.  Good luck

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Your only practical options are either MARK or M-SURGE/E-SURGE.
M-Surge used to be much easier to work with than Mark since you could 
write simple commands that control what you want the program to do 
instead of more or less manually manipulate matrices as in Mark.
In this way even complex analyses is simple to perform. However, Mark 
can now be run from R.

I mainly use M-Surge. For what it does (including simple and multi-state 
standard capture-recapture analyses) it is a superb program and as 
simple to use as it gets. Mark is more general and can do other things.

Information and discussion of capture-recapture software can be found at 
http://www.phidot.org/forum/index.php

Capture-recapture is not something you learn to do in an afternoon, though.
Start with the "Gentle introduction" by Cooch and White: 
http://www.phidot.org/software/mark/docs/book/

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    Dear evoldir,
    I am about to start a mark-recapture study. Which software would you
    recommend for analyzing the data? So far I have found the software MARK.

    Kind regards,
    Peter Halvarsson
    Phd-student, EBC, Uppsala University

peter.halvarsson.1887@student.uu.se