Evaluating the effectiveness of joint species distribution modeling for fresh water fish communities within large watersheds

Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
By: , and 

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Abstract

Accurately predicting species’ distributions is critical for the management and conservation of fish and wildlife populations. Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs) account for dependencies between species often ignored by traditional species distribution models. We evaluated how a JSDM approach could improve predictive strength for stream fish communities within large watersheds (the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, USA), using a cross-validation study of JSDMs fit to data from over 50 species. Our results suggest that conditional predictions from JSDMs have the potential to make large improvements in predictive accuracy for many species, particularly for more generalist species where single species models may not perform well. For some species there was no added explanatory effect from conditional information, most of which already exhibited strong marginal predictive ability. For several rare species there were significant improvements in occurrence predictions, while the results for two invasive species considered did not show the same improvements. Overall, the optimal number of species to condition upon, as well as the effects of conditioning upon an increasing number of species, varied widely among species.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Evaluating the effectiveness of joint species distribution modeling for fresh water fish communities within large watersheds
Series title Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
DOI 10.1139/cjfas-2023-0385
Edition Online First
Year Published 2024
Language English
Publisher Canadian Science Publishing
Contributing office(s) Coop Res Unit Leetown, Eastern Ecological Science Center
Country United States
Other Geospatial Chesapeake Bay watershed
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