A Dynamic Occupancy Model for Interacting Species with Two Spatial Scales

Abstract Occupancy models have been extended to account for either multiple spatial scales or species interactions in a dynamic setting. However, as interacting (e.g., predators and prey) often operate at different scales, including nested structure might be especially relevant of species. Here we bridge these two model frameworks by developing multi-scale, two-species occupancy model. The is dynamic, i.e. it estimates initial occupancy, colonization extinction probabilities—including probabilities conditional the other species’ presence. With simulation study, demonstrate that able estimate most parameters without marked bias under low, medium high average probabilities, well detection with only small some low-detection scenarios. We further evaluate model’s ability deal sparse field data applying multi-scale camera trapping dataset on mustelid-rodent predator–prey system. Most are estimated low uncertainty (i.e. narrow posterior distributions). More broadly, our framework creates opportunities explicitly found many spatially study designs, contrasting movement ranges traps.Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online.