Blount J David, Green Austin M, Chynoweth Mark, Çoban Emrah, Kusak Josip, Şekercioğlu Çağan H
School of Biological Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America.
Science Research Initiative, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2025 May 14;20(5):e0320768. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0320768. eCollection 2025.
Occupancy and N-mixture analyses have been successfully used to understand habitat use in various species. However, since these methods fundamentally answer different questions about wildlife distribution, the results from each modelling approach may provide different insights into species' habitat use. In this study, we leveraged data from a long-term camera trapping study in northeastern Türkiye to compare the results from occupancy and N-mixture analyses, with the main objective of understanding how the modelling approach used can influence our knowledge of species' habitat use. Specifically, we compared the habitat use preferences from N-mixture and occupancy analyses for three carnivore species with varying baseline abundances. Our results provide evidence that occupancy and N-mixture analyses provide different insights into species' sensitivity to environmental and anthropogenic factors. Whereas occupancy analysis provides a relatively broad summary of the factors that affect where a species may or may not be located on a landscape or which areas they may be more likely to use over a certain time period, N-mixture modelling may provide insights into the factors that affect the degree of use at individual sites, with particular emphasis on being able to deduce small-scale changes in habitat use across a landscape. Furthermore, while the detection probability of an occupancy analysis has been formally used as a measure of site use intensity, N-Mixture models may offer higher resolution of the quantity of use. Therefore, as these two methods tend to investigate habitat use at different spatial scales, when used in conjunction they can provide a more refined understanding of species' habitat use through repeat-survey sampling methods like camera trapping.
占有率分析和N-混合模型分析已成功用于了解各种物种的栖息地利用情况。然而，由于这些方法从根本上回答了有关野生动物分布的不同问题，因此每种建模方法的结果可能会对物种的栖息地利用提供不同的见解。在本研究中，我们利用土耳其东北部一项长期相机陷阱研究的数据，比较占有率分析和N-混合模型分析的结果，主要目的是了解所使用的建模方法如何影响我们对物种栖息地利用的认识。具体而言，我们比较了N-混合模型分析和占有率分析对三种具有不同基线丰度的食肉动物物种的栖息地利用偏好。我们的结果表明，占有率分析和N-混合模型分析对物种对环境和人为因素的敏感性提供了不同的见解。占有率分析提供了一个相对宽泛的总结，说明哪些因素影响一个物种在某一景观中可能存在或不存在的位置，或者在某一时间段内它们更可能使用哪些区域，而N-混合模型建模可以提供有关影响个体地点利用程度的因素的见解，特别强调能够推断整个景观中栖息地利用的小规模变化。此外，虽然占有率分析的检测概率已被正式用作场地利用强度的一种度量，但N-混合模型可能提供更高分辨率的利用量。因此，由于这两种方法倾向于在不同的空间尺度上研究栖息地利用情况，当结合使用时，它们可以通过相机陷阱等重复调查采样方法，对物种的栖息地利用提供更精确的理解。
