Flo’s paper on integration of presence-only and presence-absence data has just been published online (Grattarola et al. 2023, Journal of Biogeography)! This was a wonderful collaboration with Diana Bolwer who helped us a great deal.

We have developed a new method that will enable us to map contractions and expansions of species’ geographic distributions, in regions and in species for which we have limited or badly heterogeneous data. The method can be super useful for assessment of conservation status of some charismatic species such as carnivorous mammals.

Flo pushed both conceptual and computational boundaries here, and it was totally worth it. We now have a fully Bayesian model that integrates two completely different types of data (presence-only points, presence-absence data), it considers spatial autocorrelation, temporal dimension, observational effort, environmental covariates, and it operates across a continuum of spatial scales. The model comes with a cool example species: Go Yaguarundi! Plus there is a commented code, and tons of materials for everyone to use and copy.

See Flo’s webpage for more info on her research.