A comparison of the inferential, computational, and predictive performance of joint species distribution models

Abstract

The standard correlative species distribution model accounts for the effect of the environment on species distributions without explicitly accounting for the effect of species interactions. Community ecology, in contrast, studies species co-occurrence patterns without accounting for the co-occurrence that could be explained by the shared response of species to the environment. Joint species distribution models (JSDMs) are a relatively recent development in the ecological literature that extend the single species distribution model framework to model multiple species simultaneously while accounting for species co-occurrence, and are an exciting prospect for bridging the gap between these two ..