Estimation of species relative abundances and habitat preferences using opportunistic data

Abstract

We develop a new statistical procedure to monitor, with opportunist data, relative species abundances and their respective preferences for dierent habitat types. Following Giraud et al. (2015), we combine the opportunistic data with some standardized data in order to correct the bias inherent to the opportunistic data collection. Our main contributions are (i) to tackle the bias induced by habitat selection behaviors, (ii) to handle data where the habitat type associated to each observation is unknown, (iii) to estimate probabilities of selection of habitat for the species. As an illustration, we estimate common bird species habitat preferences and abundances in the region of Aquitaine (France).