Welcome to your site

Hey Zitong and Joe!

This site was made for you both and introduces the fundamentals and advanced topics in occupancy modelling that you’ll need to do your honours project. I’ve tried to write the material to be accessible for you both, in terms of your honours projects, but also to help boost your skillset for when you finish you undergraduate.

As always, if there is anything in the site that is either wrong or confusing, just let me know. If it helps, I would be amazed if you understood everything that’s covered, so it’s my prior belief that parts will need to be explained in person.

Suggested Order

To get the most out of this material, I recommend the following order:

  1. Occupancy Models: The basics
    Learn the basic theory of occupancy models and how they help us infer species presence or absence from imperfect detection.

  2. Occupancy Models: Covariates
    Learn how site and survey covariates can improve our biological understanding and enhance the accuracy of our inferences.

  3. Bayesian models: The concept
    Learn the basic theory of the Bayesian statistical framework: what’s a prior, and what’s a posterior?

  4. Fitting Bayesian Models
    Combine occupancy models with the Bayesian framework to fit models using the spOccupancy package.

  5. Spatial Occupancy Models Learn about spatial autocorrelation and how to incorporate it in spOccupancy.

Enjoy!