The package included in this Group-Management folder helps storing and importing data from group-living species into PMx. This package consists of: (i) a data entry sheet in Excel that allows registration of group data, and (ii) group2PMx, a converter that transforms the Excel file into a .csv file readable by PMx.

The software PMx (Ballou et al., 2014; Lacy et al., 2012) allows the conservation community to perform demographic and genetic analysis of populations from which pedigree data are available. This program was created to analyze pedigree data from individual records as registered and stored in SPARKS (ISIS, 2012) and PopLink (Faust et al., 2012), but also allows for the analysis of data from group-living organisms. The Group-management package allows importing this data into PMx.

Note that the data entry sheet in Excel can also be used for individual records in addition to groups. This will allow conservation managers outside the zoo and aquarium community (without access to SPARKS or PopLink) to have a user-friendly template in Excel in which to register the individuals of the population and still perform an analysis in PMx.

The Group-Management Package and group2PMx should be cited as:

Jiménez-Mena, B.; Schad, K.; Hanna, N. & Lacy, R.C. (2015) Pedigree analysis for the genetic management of group-living species. Ecology and Evolution. 2016, 6(10). 3067-3078. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.1831

Jiménez-Mena, B.; Schad, K. & Lacy, R.C. (2015) User Manual for group management in PMx. Available from http://www.vortex10.org/PMx.aspx or https://github.com/BelenJM/Group_Management