[R] lme: extract variance estimate

[Stephen Ellner]

For a Monte Carlo study I need to extract from an lme model
the estimated standard deviation of a random effect 
and store it in a vector. If I do a print() or summary() 
on the model, the number I need is displayed in the Console 
[it's the 0.1590195 in the output below] 

>print(fit)
>Linear mixed-effects model fit by maximum likelihood
>  Data: datag2 
>  Log-likelihood: -145.0028
>  Fixed: lst1 ~ lst 
>(Intercept)         lst 
>  1.1080629   0.7582595 
>
>Random effects:
> Formula: ~1 | yeart
>        (Intercept)  Residual
>StdDev:   0.1590195 0.3313497

However I have not been able to find that number anywhere in the 
model object returned by lme. Can anyone tell me how to pull it
or compute it from a model returned by lme? Ditto for models with
random intercept fitted by glmmPQL with family=binomial. 

Details:
The relevant data are the first 3 colums from the
data frame extracted below. Yeart is a factor (year of
study) ranging from 1 to 16. The model is linear regression of 
lst1 on lst with constant slope, random intercept varying
across years. I'm using R 1.9.1 in WinXP and the current
version of nlme from CRAN. 

Code: 
datag2=groupedData(lst1~1|yeart,data=cdata); 
mixed.grow=lme(fixed=lst1~lst,random=~1, method="ML",data=datag2);

mixed.surv=glmmPQL(fixed=surv~lst, random=~1|yeart, family=binomial,
data=cdata,niter=50);

Some of the data: 
     yeart      lst     lst1 surv flow
1        1 3.158088 3.331216    1    0
2        1 2.472618 2.486410    1    0
3        1 3.582950 3.417807    1    0
4        1 3.554819 3.377117    1    0
5        1 2.830049 2.992426    1    0
6        1 2.779616 3.240449    1    0
7        1 2.580484 2.930154    1    0

Thanks in advance,
Steve 


Stephen P. Ellner (spe2 at cornell.edu)
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Corson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853-2701
Phone (607) 254-4221    FAX (607) 255-8088