Modeling spatiotemporal abundance of mobile wildlife in highly variable environments using boosted GAMLSS hurdle models

1. Modeling organism distributions from survey data involves numerous statistical challenges, including zero-inflation, overdispersion, and selection and incorporation of environmental covariates. In environments with high spatial and temporal variability, addressing these challenges often requires numerous assumptions regarding organism distributions and their relationships to biophysical features. These assumptions may limit the resolution or accuracy of predictions resulting from survey-based distribution models. 2. We propose an iterative modeling approach that incorporates a negative binomial hurdle, followed by modeling the relationship of organism distribution and abundance to environmental covariates using generalized additive models (GAM) and generalized additive models for location, scale, and shape (GAMLSS). Our approach accounts for key features of survey data by separating binary (presence-absence) from count (abundance) data, separately modeling the mean and dispersion of...