Advanced Occupancy Modeling

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course is aimed at participants that have completed the introductory-level course, or have suitable practical experience implementing species occurrence models that account for imperfect detection. In this course, learn the underlying theory of multi-scale, multi-state, species co-occurrence, and community level models and then put your new knowledge into practice. All hands-on exercises will be conducted in R, covering data analysis and presentation of results (plotting results, creating maps, etc.).

TOPICS

• Review of basic, static occupancy model: model development, covariates, creating species distribution maps

• Study design

• Correlated detection occupancy model

• Multi-scale occupancy model

• Spatial correlation in occupancy

• Static multi-state occupancy model

• False positive detection models

• Review of dynamic occupancy model

• Dynamic multi-state occupancy model

• Species co-occurrence models

• Community-level models

• Joint occupancy-habitat dynamics model

PREREQUISITES

• Introduction to Occupancy Modeling or experience in RPresence

• Experienced in statistics and modeling in R (e.g., Ecological Statistics and Modeling & Generalized Models)

• Experience with JAGS for fitting models using Bayesian methods in R is advantageous (e.g., Intro to Bayesian Modeling in Ecology)