Predicting fish species richness and habitat relationships using Bayesian hierarchical multispecies occupancy models

Canadian Journal Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
National Park Service
By: , and 

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Abstract

Understanding how stream fishes respond to changes in habitat availability is complicated by low occurrence rates of many species, which in turn reduces the ability to quantify species–habitat relationships and account for imperfect detection in estimates of species richness. Multispecies occupancy models have been used sparingly in the analysis of fisheries data, but address the aforementioned deficiencies by allowing information to be shared among ecologically similar species, thereby enabling species–habitat relationships to be estimated for entire fish communities, including rare species. Here, we highlight the utility of hierarchical multispecies occupancy models for the analysis of fish community data and demonstrate the modeling framework on a stream fish community dataset collected in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, USA. In particular, we demonstrate the ability of the modeling framework to make inferences at the species-, guild-, and community-levels, thereby making it a powerful tool for understanding and predicting how environmental variables influence species occupancy probabilities and structure fish assemblages.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Predicting fish species richness and habitat relationships using Bayesian hierarchical multispecies occupancy models
Series title Canadian Journal Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
DOI 10.1139/cjfas-2019-0125
Volume 77
Issue 3
Year Published 2019
Language English
Publisher Canadian Science Publishing
Contributing office(s) Coop Res Unit Leetown
Description 9 p.
Country United States
State New York New Jersey, Pennsylvania
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