Journal Article

Generalized site occupancy models allowing for false positive and false negative errors

Link, William A., Royle, J. Andrew

2006

Overview

Site occupancy models have been developed that allow for imperfect species detection or \"false negative\" observations. Such models have become widely adopted in surveys of many taxa. The most fundamental assumption underlying these models is that \"false positive\" errors are not possible. That is, one cannot detect a species where it does not occur. However, such errors are possible in many sampling situations for a number of reasons, and even low false positive error rates can induce extreme bias in estimates of site occupancy when they are not accounted for. In this paper, we develop a model for site occupancy that allows for both false negative and false positive error rates. This model can be represented as a two-component finite mixture model and can be easily fitted using freely available software. We provide an analysis of avian survey data using the proposed model and present results of a brief simulation study evaluating the performance of the maximum-likelihood estimator and the naive estimator in the presence of false positive errors.

• Publisher: Ecological Society of America
• Subject: Amphibians / Animal and plant ecology / animal ecology / Animal, plant and microbial ecology / Animals / Binomials / Biological and medical sciences / detection / Ecological modeling / Error analysis / Estimation bias / False negative errors / False Negative Reactions / False positive errors / False Positive Reactions / finite mixture / Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology / General aspects / heterogeneous detection probability / latent class model / Likelihood Functions / mathematical models / Modeling / multinomial misclassification / multinomial mixtures / nondetection bias / occurrence probability / Parametric models / population ecology / probability analysis / proportion of area occupied / sampling / simulation models / Species / Statistical Reports / surveys / Taxonomy / Wildlife ecology