Smoothing hazard functions for telemetry survival data in wildlife studies

Radiotelemetry has become a very popular technique for avian survival studi es in recent years. Usually the survival function is estimated. However, th e hazard function (the instantaneous rate of change in mortality) is also v ery important in wildlife ecology. We explain important reasons for estimat ing the hazard function in wildlife ecology, and show how to estimate the h azard function by applying smoothing techniques (also called non-parametric regression) to telemetry data. We illustrate the smoothing methodology wit h an example using survival data from a study on wild turkeys in West Virgi nia.