0000000000338354
AUTHOR
Tuomas Rajala
Identifying territories using presence-only citizen science data : An application to the Finnish wolf population
Citizens, community groups and local institutions participate in voluntary biological monitoring of population status and trends by providing species data e.g. for regulations and conservation. Sophisticated statistical methods are required to unlock the potential of such data in the assessment of wildlife populations. We develop a statistical modelling framework for identifying territories based on presence-only citizen science data. The framework can be used to jointly estimate the number of active animal territories and their locations in time. Our approach is based on a data generating model which consists of a dynamic submodel for the appearance/removal of territories and an observatio…
Bayesian analysis of a Gibbs hard-core point pattern model with varying repulsion range
A Bayesian solution is suggested for the modelling of spatial point patterns with inhomogeneous hard-core radius using Gaussian processes in the regularization. The key observation is that a straightforward use of the finite Gibbs hard-core process likelihood together with a log-Gaussian random field prior does not work without penalisation towards high local packing density. Instead, a nearest neighbour Gibbs process likelihood is used. This approach to hard-core inhomogeneity is an alternative to the transformation inhomogeneous hard-core modelling. The computations are based on recent Markovian approximation results for Gaussian fields. As an application, data on the nest locations of Sa…