Density-dependent detectability in dynamic occupancy survey: a case study on a vulnerable beetle species in hollow trees

Conservation of threaten species living in fragmented habitats crucially relies on evaluating their occupancy and their ability to colonize and persist in habitat patches. Fitting stochastic patch occupancy models (SPOMs) to occupancy data can help assessing these features. However it is critical to account for the limited detectability of target species in this type of analysis to avoid severe biases in estimation. Detectability of a population in a habitat patch often tightly depends on the local density of individuals. This connection between density and detectability has rarely been used in SPOM analysis, even when abundance data are available. The two quantities are often considered in…