Capitalising on Opportunistic Data for Monitoring Species Relative Abundances
Résumé
With the internet, a massive amount of information on species
abundance can be collected under citizen science programs. However,
these data are often difficult to use directly in statistical
inference, as their collection is generally opportunistic, and the
distribution of the sampling effort is often not known. In this
paper, we develop a general statistical framework to combine such
``opportunistic data'' with data collected using schemes
characterized by a known sampling effort. Under some structural
assumptions regarding the sampling effort and detectability, our
approach allows to estimate the relative abundance of several
species in different sites. It can be implemented through a simple
generalized linear model. We illustrate the framework with
typical bird datasets from the Aquitaine region, south-western
France. We show that, under some assumptions, our approach provides
estimates that are more precise than the ones obtained from the
dataset with a known sampling effort alone. When the opportunistic data are abundant, the gain in precision
may be considerable, especially for the rare species. We also
show that estimates can be obtained even for species recorded only
in the opportunistic scheme. Opportunistic data combined with a
relatively small amount of data collected with a known effort may
thus provide access to accurate and precise estimates of
quantitative changes in relative abundance over space and/or
time.
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