ArticlePloS one2018
A comment on priors for Bayesian occupancy models.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 32 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Niche Partitioning and Facilitative Coexistence of Two Sympatric Pheasants Across a Gradient of Human Disturbance.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Assessment of Nontarget Small Mammal Occupancy Using Broadly Designed Camera Arrays.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Twenty-Two Years of Shrub Encroachment and Its Effects on Bird Communities in an African Savanna.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- When Do Single-Species Occupancy Models Outperform Multispecies Models?Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Tropical biodiversity loss from land-use change is severely underestimated by local-scale assessments.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Integrating data to assess occupancy patterns of an endangered bumble bee.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- On the Brink: Mapping the Last Strongholds of the Critically Endangered Flapper Skate (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Combining observational and experimental data to estimate environmental and species drivers of fungal metacommunity dynamics.Ecology · 2025Article
- Monitoring Animal Populations With Cameras Using Open, Multistate, N-Mixture Models.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Do Mesocarnivores Respond to the Seasonality in Management Practices in an Agroforestry Landscape?Environmental management · 2024Article
- Generalized nonlinearity in animal ecology: Research, review, and recommendations.Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- Riding the wetland wave: Can ducks locate macroinvertebrate resources across the breeding season?Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Patterns in bird and pollinator occupancy and richness in a mosaic of urban office parks across scales and seasons.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- Diel activity structures the occurrence of a mammal community in a human-dominated landscape.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Profile Likelihood for Hierarchical Models Using Data Doubling.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Additive and interactive effects of anthropogenic stressors on an insect herbivore.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Concordant and opposing effects of climate and land-use change on avian assemblages in California's most transformed landscapes.Science advances · 2023Article
- Zero-inflated count distributions for capture-mark-reencounter data.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Asymmetrical intraguild interactions with coyotes, red foxes, and domestic dogs may contribute to competitive exclusion of declining gray foxes.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding patterns of species occurrence and the processes underlying these patterns is fundamental to the study of ecology. One of the more commonly used approaches to investigate species occurrence patterns is occupancy modeling, which can account for imperfect detection of a species during surveys. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of Bayesian modeling in ecology, which includes fitting Bayesian occupancy models. The Bayesian framework is appealing to ecologists for many reasons, including the ability to incorporate prior information through the specification of prior distributions on parameters. While ecologists almost exclusively intend to choose priors so that they are "uninformative" or "vague", such priors can easily be unintentionally highly informative. Here we report on how the specification of a "vague" normally distributed (i.e., Gaussian) prior on coefficients in Bayesian occupancy models can unintentionally influence parameter estimation. Using both simulated data and empirical examples, we illustrate how this issue likely compromises inference about species-habitat relationships. While the extent to which these informative priors influence inference depends on the data set, researchers fitting Bayesian occupancy models should conduct sensitivity analyses to ensure intended inference, or employ less commonly used priors that are less informative (e.g., logistic or t prior distributions). We provide suggestions for addressing this issue in occupancy studies, and an online tool for exploring this issue under different contexts.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.