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Estimation of animal abundance and distribution over large regions remains a central challenge in statistical ecology. In our first study, we use a Bayesian smoothing technique based on a conditionally autoregressive (CAR) prior distribution and Bayesian regression to integrate data from reliable but expensive surveys conducted at smaller scales with cost-effective but less reliable data generated from surveys at wider scales to address this problem. We also investigate whether the random effects which represent the spatial association due to the CAR structure have any confounding effect on the fixed effects of the regression coefficients. Next, we develop a novel Bayesian spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) model that disentangles the latent ecological process of animal arrival within a detection region from the process of recording this arrival by a given set of detectors. We integrate this into an advanced version of a recent SECR model by Royle (2015) involving partially identified individuals.
This is a joint work with Prof. Mohan Delampady..
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