Modelling of species distributions, range dynamics and communities under imperfect detection: advances, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Building useful models of species distributions requires attention to several important issues, one being imperfect detection of species. Data sets of species detections are likely to suffer from false absence records. Depending on the type of survey, false positive records can also be a problem. Disregarding these observation errors may lead to important biases in model estimation as well as overconfidence about precision. The severity of the problem depends on the intensity of these errors and how they correlate with environmental characteristics (e.g. where species detectability strongly depends on habitat features). A powerful modelling framework that accounts for imperfect detection in ..