Join us at 3 PM on Friday, September 20, in 103A Walker Hall
Dr. Staci Hepler
Wake Forest University
will speak on....
A Spatio-temporal Model for Multivariate Occupancy Data
Occupancy models are commonly used in ecological applications to model the presence/absence of a species of interest and to study how occupancy relates to environmental conditions. In this talk, I will introduce occupancy models and develop a multivariate model to simultaneously model the presence/absence of multiple species. The proposed model accounts for both spatial and temporal dependence within each species, as well as dependence across all species. We demonstrate the model with a three species camera trap study on Thomson's gazelle, wildebeest, and zebra in the Serengeti National Park of Tanzania, Africa. Our model quantifies the environmental associates for each species and also the strength of the association between each species pair.