Joint estimation of species environmental niches and sampling effort from presence only records and its application to the Pl@ntNet citizen-science flora data

Speaker: Christophe Botella (INRA/INRIA)

Abstract

Naturalist mobile applications have been deployed worldwide in the last years and enabled access to a considerable amount of geolocated species presences records. This novel type of data represents a step forward to address ecological and conservation questions through the use of species distribution models (SDMs). However, in the absence of a sampling protocol, the sampling effort often concentrates on specific locations (cities, riverside walks, etc.) located in specific environments, resulting in estimation biases in SDMs. During my PhD, I worked on a method to estimate unbiased parameters of ecological niche. It is based on a marked Poisson processes jointly modeling multiple species environmental intensity and the sampling effort. The latter is modeled with a spatial step function defined over a regular mesh. I will introduce the method and its results of its application to Pl@ntNet’s citizen science data, integrating several hundred plant species and hundreds of thousands of observations over France with a highly biased sampling.