Abstract: Ecological invasions and colonizations occur dynamically through space and time. Estimating the distribution and abundance of colonizing species is critical for efficient management or conservation. We describe a statistical framework for simultaneously estimating spatio-temporal occupancy and abundance dynamics of a colonizing species. Our method accounts for several issues that are common when modeling spatio-temporal ecological data including: multiple levels of detection probability, multiple data sources, and computational limitations that occur when making fine-scale inference over a large spatio-temporal domain. We apply the model to estimate the colonization dynamics of sea otters (Enhydra lutris) in Glacier Bay, in southeastern Alaska.
New manuscript accepted in Ecology on spatio-temporal methods for estimating colonization dynamics
