Community confounding in joint species distribution models.

ABSTRACT: Joint species distribution models have become ubiquitous for studying species-environment relationships and dependence among species. Accounting for community structure often improves predictive power, but can also affect inference on species-environment relationships. Specifically, some parameterizations of joint species distribution models allow interspecies dependence and environmental effects to explain the same sources of variability in species distributions, a phenomenon we call community confounding. We present a method for measuring community confounding and show how to orthogonalize the environmental and random species effects in suite of joint species distribution models. In a simulation study, we show that community confounding can lead to computational difficulties and that ort

SUBMITTER: Van Ee JJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9294001 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature