Jeff Doser wants to give conservationists the tools they need to make better decisions.
Jeff Doser wants to give conservationists the tools they need to make better decisions. As a postdoctoral researcher in Michigan State University’s Zipkin Quantitative Ecology Lab in the College of Natural Science (NatSci), he and his team developed a unique model to analyze declining biodiversity and understand the changes occurring within individual species and across broader wildlife communities.
In a new paper, published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, the team shows how integrating data from multiple species and data sources can take analyses a step further than previous approaches. Their integrated community occupancy model, or ICOM, merges two fields of statistical ecology, data integration and hierarchical community modeling, into a single analytical framework that can reveal how biodiversity patterns and dynamics are changing over space and time.
“By taking a holistic approach, we can make better conservation recommendations,” Doser said. “We can evaluate how species and whole communities are responding to global changes and we can determine which areas to prioritize for conservation. We can also pinpoint locations with insufficient data.”
Read more at: Michigan State University
