Explainer series · Occupancy Modelling Deon Roos · Aberdeen

Occupancy
Modelling

Hey Stuart, Morgan, and Niels!

This site was made for you all 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 all, in terms of your honours projects, but also to help boost your skillset for when you finish you undergraduate.

zᵢ ~ Bernoulli(ψᵢ)
yᵢⱼ ~ Bernoulli(zᵢ·p)

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

01 Occupancy Models: The basicsLearn the basic theory of occupancy models and how they help us infer species presence or absence from imperfect detection. ↗ 02 Occupancy Models: CovariatesLearn how site and survey covariates can improve our biological understanding and enhance the accuracy of our inferences. ↗ 03 Bayesian models: The conceptLearn the basic theory of the Bayesian statistical framework: what’s a prior, and what’s a posterior? ↗ 04 Fitting Bayesian ModelsCombine occupancy models with the Bayesian framework to fit models using the spOccupancy package. ↗ 05 Spatial Occupancy ModelsLearn about spatial autocorrelation and how to incorporate it in spOccupancy. ↗

Enjoy.