0000000000595780
AUTHOR
Steven C. Walker
Extending Joint Models in Community Ecology : A Response to Beissinger et al.
The joint modelling of many variables in community ecology is a new and technically challenging area with many opportunities for future developments. The possibility of extending joint models to deal with imperfect detection has been highlighted by Beissinger et al. as an important problem worthy of further investigation [1]. We agree, and previously pointed to this potential extension as an outstanding question [2], alongside models that can estimate phylogenetic repulsion or attraction, nonlinearity in the response to latent variables, and spatial or temporal correlation, because further developments in all these directions are needed.
So Many Variables: Joint Modeling in Community Ecology
Technological advances have enabled a new class of multivariate models for ecology, with the potential now to specify a statistical model for abundances jointly across many taxa, to simultaneously explore interactions across taxa and the response of abundance to environmental variables. Joint models can be used for several purposes of interest to ecologists, including estimating patterns of residual correlation across taxa, ordination, multivariate inference about environmental effects and environment-by-trait interactions, accounting for missing predictors, and improving predictions in situations where one can leverage knowledge of some species to predict others. We demonstrate this by exa…