Random effects in spOccupancy

[Sarah Broadway]

Hello,

I am fitting multi-species occupancy models in spOccupancy and I am a bit confused about the language regarding random effects. Are random slopes and intercepts for species incorporated into the model?

Thank you,

Sarah

[Jeffrey Doser]

Hi Sarah, 

Yes, for multi-species occupancy models, there are automatically random intercepts and slopes by species. In other words, each species has its own individual intercept and slope, and these species-level effects are random effects where the effects are drawn from a normal distribution with an overall mean (community-wide average) and variance (variance in the effects across species in the community).

Jeff

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Jeffrey W. Doser, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources

North Carolina State University

Statistical Ecology and Forest Science Lab

Pronouns: he/him/his

[Mohamad Nur-hafizuddin Abdullah Mohamad Norajame]

Hi Jeffrey,

I saw this discussion and I want to quickly ask regarding grouping species into communities for multi-species modeling. I find it quite difficult on how to select species to be included in the analysis. I read a paper about this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.72315. To my understanding, we need to include species that responds similarly to covariates in the model. 

I did ran the model with a group of primates species and I found out that one of the occurrence covariates have high community variance. Does this mean that I need to check again the species that I included in the model? 

Kind regards,

Hafiz