https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4266-1703
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Léa Pautrel, Marie-Pierre Etienne, Olivier Gimenez, Discussion on “Continuous-space occupancy models” by Wilson J. Wright and Mevin B. Hooten, Biometrics, Volume 81, Issue 2, June 2025, ujaf057, https://doi.org/10.1093/biomtc/ujaf057
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
1 INTRODUCTION
Within the family of models designed to estimate species presence, known as species distribution models (SDMs), occupancy models account for imperfect detection. While there are multiple available options to perform SDMs in continuous space, this is not the case for occupancy models. Wright and Hooten (in press) propose a very interesting approach to fill this gap. They propose a novel approach using a clipped Gaussian process to infer species presence over continuous space, instead of the traditional site-based occupancy models. Their proposition has significant potential, and we examine it further from both practical and ecological perspectives.
2 MODEL FORMULATION
There are 2 major ecological benefits to the authors’ approach: the ability to estimate the actual proportion of area occupied (as opposed to the proportion of sites occupied) and the potential to address the issue of change-of-support, when the spatial scale is not aligned between different spatial data sources.
