Sharing detection heterogeneity information among species in community models of occupancy and abundance can strengthen inference

1. The estimation of abundance and distribution and factors governing patterns in these parameters is central to the field of ecology. The continued development of hierarchical models that best utilize available information to inform these processes is a key goal of quantitative ecologists. However, much remains to be learned about simultaneously modeling true abundance, presence, and trajectories of ecological communities.

2. Simultaneous modeling of the population dynamics of multiple species provides an interesting mechanism to examine patterns in community processes and, as we emphasize herein, to improve species-specific estimates by leveraging detection information among species. Here we demonstrate a simple but effective approach to share information about observation parameters among species in hierarchical community abundance and occupancy models, where we use shared random effects among species to account for spatiotemporal heterogeneity in detection probability.

3. We d...