Socolar, J.B., Mills, S.C., Haugaasen, T. et al. (2 more authors) (2022) Biogeographic multi‐species occupancy models for large‐scale survey data. Ecology and Evolution, 12 (10). e9328. ISSN 2045-7758
Abstract
Ecologists often seek to infer patterns of species occurrence or community structure from survey data. Hierarchical models, including multi-species occupancy models (MSOMs), can improve inference by pooling information across multiple species via random effects. Originally developed for local-scale survey data, MSOMs are increasingly applied to larger spatial scales that transcend major abiotic gradients and dispersal barriers. At biogeographic scales, the benefits of partial pooling in MSOMs trade off against the difficulty of incorporating sufficiently complex spatial effects to account for biogeographic variation in occupancy across multiple species simultaneously. We show how this challenge can be overcome by incorporating preexisting range information into MSOMs, yielding a “biogeographic multi-species occupancy model” (bMSOM). We illustrate the bMSOM using two published datasets: Parulid warblers in the United States Breeding Bird Survey and entire avian communities in forests and pastures of Colombia's West Andes. Compared with traditional MSOMs, the bMSOM provides dramatically better predictive performance at lower computational cost. The bMSOM avoids severe spatial biases in predictions of the traditional MSOM and provides principled species-specific inference even for never-observed species. Incorporating preexisting range data enables principled partial pooling of information across species in large-scale MSOMs. Our biogeographic framework for multi-species modeling should be broadly applicable in hierarchical models that predict species occurrences, whether or not false absences are modeled in an occupancy framework.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | community model; hierarchical model; occupancy model; pooling; spatial scale |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) > Department of Biomedical Science (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCIL NE/R017441/1 RESEARCH COUNCIL OF NORWAY nan |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 17 Oct 2022 15:51 |
Last Modified: | 14 Nov 2022 14:44 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/ece3.9328 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:191903 |