TRAMPOline: a Temporal Relative Abundance-focused multi-sPecies
Occupancy model, illustrated using fossils
Abstract
The occupancy and relative abundance of species are temporally varying.
Estimating these, given incomplete and biased sampling is challenging,
not least for fossilized organisms, where preservation is an additional
issue. Here, we describe a relative abundance-focused multi-species
occupancy model (TRAMPOline) in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We
designed our model on the basis of the need to understand the dynamics
of several focal species over 2.3 million years, by drawing on
additional information provided by non-focal species observed in the
same fossilized community. We expanded our model by adding random
effects of species and time intervals (geological formations) and
explored potential explanatory factors (paleoenvironmental proxies) and
temporal autocorrelation that could provide extra information on
unsampled geological time intervals. Our new model, set in an occupancy
modeling framework widely used in ecology but little applied in
paleoecology, is applicable across a wide range of questions on
species-level dynamics in contemporary and palaeoecological community
settings.