multiocc: An R Package for Spatio-Temporal Occupancy Models for Multiple Species

Department of Statistical Sciences, Wake Forest University

heplersa@wfu.edu

Department of Statistical Sciences, Wake Forest University

erhardrj@wfu.edu

Abstract

Spatio-temporal occupancy models are used to model the presence or absence of a species at particular locations and times, while accounting for dependence in both space and time. Multivariate extensions can be used to simultaneously model multiple species, which introduces another dimension to the dependence structure in the data. In this paper we introduce multiocc, an R package for fitting multivariate spatio-temporal occupancy models. We demonstrate the use of this package fitting the multi-species spatio-temporal occupancy model to data on six species of birds from the Swiss MHB Breeding Bird Survey.

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