Instructor and ESF attendees of the Advanced Occupancy Modeling workshop at Cornell. Back row, from left: Darryl MacKenzie, Alison Kocek, Wendy Leuenberger, Jonathan Cohen, Amanda Cheeseman, Maureen Durkin. Front row: Lisanne Petracca, Lilian Bonjorne de Almeida, Chee Pheng Low, Michelle Peach. One of the central problems in wildlife ecology and conservation is understanding the factors that affect the distribution of organisms in space and time. Distribution models often are used to study habitat relationships, interactions between species, and response to natural and human-induced environmental change. Surveys intended to document the presence of species at particular locations are usually biased by imperfect detection of organisms. This bias can be corrected through the use of Occupancy Modeling. Members of the Cohen, Frair, and Parry labs at ESF recently attended basic and advanced workshops in Occupancy Modeling hosted by the Cornell Department of Natural Resources. The workshops were given by Darryl Mackenzie, lead author of "Occupancy Modeling: Inferring Patterns and Dynamics of Species Occurrence." Participants gained practice with static and dynamic models, correlated detection and multi-scale models, multi-state models, and multi-species models. We look forward to applying these important tools in our own work!
RSS Feed
