Hi Alex, I'm working with Strava metro to look at recreational effects on wildlife in the Cairngorms! Happy to chat more

A new #OpenAccess Statistical Report in "Ecology"!👀

🚨 So "How many sites do I need"? The answer = it depends on inference objective! We provide recommended minimum sample sizes for different contexts based on our simulation outputs here ⬇️ P.s. all our code is freely available on OSF, so have a play around!

Take home 4: In all scenarios, far fewer sites were needed to estimate the conditional and marginal occupancy probabilities (i.e. prediction), compared to the exact interaction term (i.e. inference)

Take home 3: Adding covariates to the model also upped the sample sizes needed to estimate interaction terms without bias 💻🌲

Take home 2: Adding more species to the models reduced the power to detect interactions of a similar strength. For example, a null model with 5 species needed 400 sites compared to 250 sites with 3 species

Take home 1: Under the simplest model structure, we needed around 200 sites to detect and estimate strong interactions without bias. These requirements increased when (1) detection probability was lower and (2) species interactions were weaker

We did an extensive simulation study to show how well the Rota et al multispecies occupancy model estimates interaction terms under different detection probabilities, interaction strengths, interaction directions (positive/negative) and model structures, from 20 to ~3000 sites

📝 Are you using multispecies occupancy models to investigate interactions in species occupancy (i.e. co-occurrence)? 🦁🦓

Check out our new paper for advice on the number of sites you need to reliably detect interactions under different scenarios ⬇️

New paper alert ⚠️ Using #AI tools like #megadetector and #birdNET to process camera trap images or audio recordings?

Read our perspective piece for some considerations and guidance on
📊 working with 0-1 confidence scores
🤔 making thresholding decisions
🧑‍💻 and navigating AI-labelling errors

I'll be talking at the @pintofscience.uk festival in St Andrews on May 19! Come along to learn about how AI works, how it's revolutionising ecology and what it's costing the earth 🌍 pintofscience.co.uk/event/ale-go...

Now accepting applicants for 25-26 intake of our #StatisticalEcology MSc: bit.ly/3ooHNyc. A unique opportunity to develop skills at the interface of #statistics and #ecology (some partial scholarships available too). Please help me share!

The Los Angeles wildfires are climate disasters compounded, writes @ericholthaus.com

- the conditions for a January LA firestorm have never existed until now

#climatecrisis #LAfires
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

We just posted our first round of fully funded interdisciplinary challege-led projects!

netgain.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/phd-projects/

PhDs available at: @aberdeenunilib.bsky.social, @durhamuniversity.bsky.social, @glasgowunisrc.bsky.social, @uniofstandrews.bsky.social, @ukri.org

I am advertising a *fully funded* and genuinely interdisciplinary PhD looking at integrating ecology, statistics and environmental ethics. The project is part of the amazing @netgain.bsky.social. Please get in touch and share with anyone who might be interested! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

The value of simulation before analysis: @chrissuthy.bsky.social talks through work led by @ambercowans.bsky.social, yielding some cautionary lessons for users of species co-occurrence models.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#BES2024

Wow! Amazing opportunity here for South Africa based 🇿🇦 researchers to develop their quantitative skills! 🤩💻

Two workshops:

• An intro to stats in R
• Applied hierarchical modelling

The course is FREE! These opportunities rarely come about in 🇿🇦, so share widely & sign up!

#conservationscience 🌍

Huge congrats to @ambercowans.bsky.social on the acceptance of her first PhD chapter in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social:

'Improving the integration of AI into existing ecological inference workflows'

It's a perspective piece, but if you cant wait, the preprint is here:

biorxiv.org/content/10.1...