Accounting for misidentification and heterogeneity in occupancy studies using hidden Markov models

• Published in: Ecological Modelling
• Main Authors: Louvrier, Julie, Chambert, Thierry, Marboutin, Eric, Gimenez, Olivier
• Other Authors: Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CEFE), Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3 (UPVM)-Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)-Centre international d'études supérieures en sciences agronomiques (Montpellier SupAgro)-École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD France-Sud )-Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier (Montpellier SupAgro), Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage (ONCFS)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2018
• Subjects: Occupancy models; Detection heterogeneity; Species imperfect detection; False-positives; Finite-mixture models; [SDE.BE]Environmental Sciences/Biodiversity and Ecology; Canis lupus
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-02329890; https://hal.science/hal-02329890/document; https://hal.science/hal-02329890/file/1-s2.0-S0304380018302904-main.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2018.09.002

International audience Occupancy models allow assessing species occurrence while accounting for imperfect detection. As with any statistical models, occupancy models rely on several assumptions amongst which (i) there should be no unmodelled heterogeneity in the detection probability and (ii) the species should not be detected when absent from a site, in other words there should be no false positives (e.g., due to misidentification). In the real world, thesetwo assumptions are often violated. To date, models accounting simultaneously for both detection heterogeneity and false positives are yet to be developed. Here, we first show how occupancy models with false positives can be formulated as hidden Markov models (HMM). Second, benefiting from the HMM framework flexibility, we extend models with false positives to account for heterogeneity with finite mixtures. First, using simulations, we demonstrate that, as the level of heterogeneity increases, occupancy models accounting for both heterogeneity and misidentification perform better in terms of bias and precision than models accounting for misidentification only. Next, we illustrate the implementation of our new model to a real case study with grey wolves (Canis lupus) in France. We demonstrate that heterogeneity in wolf detection (false negatives) is mainly due to a heterogeneous sampling effort across space. In addition to providing a novel modeling formulation, this work illustrates the flexibility of HMM framework to formulate complex ecological models and relax important assumptions that are not always likely to hold. In particular, we show how to decompose the model structure in several simple components, in a way that provides much clearer ecological interpretation.