Occupancy with a categorical covariate

For the willow tit data, both the habitat covariates were continuous measures: elevation and percentage forest cover. We often want to use a categorical covariate such as forest type, and it’s easy to incorporate one such covariate in our JAGS code.

The example data set

For this module we’ll use camera trap data for Cape leopards from the Boland area in South Africa. Thanks to Rajan Amin and Zoological Society of London (ZSL) for making the data available. After a first survey, the area was affected by wildfires, so the team returned after the fires to compare leopard occupancy – or rather habitat use – in areas burnt vs unburnt.

This is a small data set with only 47 sites. That’s just about enough to estimate the effect of fire, provided we have at least 20 in each category, which we do here. There’s not enough data to properly estimate the effects of fire and elevation, and that model has very wide credible intervals.

You can load and inspect the data with the following code:

# Read in data
wt <- read.csv("http://bcss.org.my/data/Leopards.csv",
    comment="#")
str(leo)
# 'data.frame':   47 obs. of  7 variables:
# $ site: int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
# $ n1  : int  130 130 130 130 130 130 130 130 130 130 ...
# $ y1  : int  8 5 4 0 2 2 0 0 0 5 ...
# $ n2  : int  104 130 85 130 130 130 130 39 112 130 ...
# $ y2  : int  7 12 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 6 ...
# $ fire: chr  "Unburnt" "Unburnt" "Unburnt" "Unburnt" ...
# $ elev: int  286 894 426 1044 405 807 496 1174 653 793 ...

# Convert 'fire' to a factor
leo$fire <- factor(leo$fire)
summary(leo)
#    site            n1              y1               n2
# Min.   : 1.0   Min.   :  0.0   Min.   : 0.000   Min.   : 18.0
# 1st Qu.:12.5   1st Qu.:113.0   1st Qu.: 0.000   1st Qu.: 95.5
# Median :24.0   Median :130.0   Median : 2.000   Median :115.0
# Mean   :24.0   Mean   :114.1   Mean   : 3.128   Mean   :108.0
# 3rd Qu.:35.5   3rd Qu.:130.0   3rd Qu.: 5.000   3rd Qu.:130.0
# Max.   :47.0   Max.   :130.0   Max.   :20.000   Max.   :130.0
#     y2              fire         elev
# Min.   : 0.000   Burnt  :20   Min.   : 285.0
# 1st Qu.: 0.000   Unburnt:27   1st Qu.: 414.0
# Median : 2.000                Median : 592.0
# Mean   : 2.617                Mean   : 641.8
# 3rd Qu.: 3.000                3rd Qu.: 800.0
# Max.   :16.000                Max.   :1487.0

The rows correspond to 47 camera trap locations. n1 is the number of days that the camera trap was operating at the site during the first survey and y1 is the number of days when leopards were detected; n2 and y2 give the same data for the second survey. The fires occurred between the first and second surveys, and fire indicates whether or not the site was affected by the fire. elev is the elevation of the site in metres.

Let’s check the distribution of burnt sites across elevation to see if they may be confounded.


range(leo$elev)  # 285 1487
breaks <- seq(200, 1500, by=100)
op <- par(mfrow=2:1)
hist(leo$elev[leo$fire=="Burnt"], breaks=breaks, xlim=c(200, 1500),
    xlab="Elevation", main="Burnt")
hist(leo$elev[leo$fire=="Unburnt"], breaks=breaks, xlim=c(200, 1500),
    xlab="Elevation", main="Unburnt")
par(op)

Below 1100m there’s a good mix of burnt and unburnt sites, but all 5 sites above 1100m were burnt. If leopards avoid those 5 sites after the fires, we won’t be able to tell whether it’s because of the burning or the elevation. Fortunately we have data from before the fires, which will tell us about the effect of elevation alone.

For the next section we’ll only use the data from the second survey, after the fires.

Just one categorical covariate

With one covariate, which is categorical, we can simplify the model by estimating one value for occupancy for each category. We do not need to use a linear model.

This is almost like fitting a separate model to each category, and we need enough observations for each category to be able to do this. With a single model fit, we have the advantage of using the data from all the sites to estimate probability of detection.

Here’s the JAGS code for this model:

# File name "burn1.jags"
model{
  # likelihood
  for(i in 1:nSite) {
    z[i] ~ dbern(psi[fire[i]])
    y[i] ~ dbin(p * z[i], nOcc[i])
  }
  # priors
  for(i in 1:nCat) {
    psi[i] ~ dbeta(1,1)
  }
  p ~ dbeta(1,1)
}

Now we prepare the data. We need to convert the fire covariate to a vector with integers for the categories: 1 for burnt, 2 for unburnt (in alphabetical order, by default). If you had more categories, the numbers would be 1, 2, 3, …

fireI <- as.integer(leo$fire)
z <- ifelse(leo$y2 > 0, 1, NA)  # Known occupancy
bdata <- with(leo, list(nSite=47, nOcc=n2, y=y2,  fire=fireI,
    nCat=2, z=z))
str(bdata)
# List of 6
# $ nSite: num 47
# $ nOcc : int [1:47] 104 130 85 130 130 130 130 39 112 130 ...
# $ y    : int [1:47] 7 12 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 6 ...
# $ fire : int [1:47] 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 ...
# $ nCat : num 2
# $ z    : num [1:47] 1 1 1 NA 1 1 1 NA NA 1 ...

Now we can run the model:

library(jagsUI)
library(mcmcOutput)
wanted <- c("p", "psi")

outA1 <- jags(bdata, NULL, wanted, "burn1.jags", DIC=FALSE,
        n.chains=3, n.iter=1e4)
mcoA1 <- mcmcOutput(outA1)
diagPlot(mcoA1)
summary(mcoA1)
#         mean    sd median   l95   u95  Rhat MCEpc
# p      0.032 0.003  0.032 0.026 0.038 0.999 0.810
# psi[1] 0.595 0.111  0.596 0.377 0.806 1.000 0.689
# psi[2] 0.848 0.071  0.856 0.706 0.971 1.001 0.701

plot(mcoA1)

That ran very quickly and converged well. And it seems clear that leopards do prefer the unburnt sites (psi[2]) to the burnt sites (psi[1]). But let’s look at the effect of elevation before discussing the results further.

Categorical and continuous covariates

Once we have multiple covariates, things become a bit less simple. We need to use a linear predictor and a link function, usually the logistic (“logit”) link. But we can still use a different intercept for each category. And provided we standardise the continuous covariates, the intercept is the logit of the probability of occupancy at the mean values of all the continuous covariates. So we can use a prior on the probability. Here’s the JAGS code for this model:

# File name "burn2.jags"
model{
  # likelihood
  for(i in 1:nSite) {
    logit(psi[i]) <- b0[fire[i]] + bElev * elev[i]
    z[i] ~ dbern(psi[i])
    y[i] ~ dbin(p * z[i], nOcc[i])
  }
  # priors
  for(i in 1:nCat) {
    psi0[i] ~ dbeta(1,1)
    b0[i] <- logit(psi0[i])
  }
  bElev ~ dunif(-5, 5)
  p ~ dbeta(1,1)
}

We standardise the elevation to mean 0 and SD 1, then bundle the data and run the model:

library(wiqid)
bdata <- with(leo, list(nSite=47, nOcc=n2, y=y2, fire=fireI,
    nCat=2, elev=standardize(elev), z=z))
str(bdata)
# List of 7
# $ nSite: num 47
# $ nOcc : int [1:47] 104 130 85 130 130 130 130 39 112 130 ...
# $ y    : int [1:47] 7 12 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 6 ...
# $ fire : int [1:47] 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 ...
# $ nCat : num 2
# $ elev : num [1:47] -1.227 0.87 -0.744 1.388 -0.817 ...
# $ z    : num [1:47] 1 1 1 NA 1 1 NA NA NA 1 ...

wanted = c("p", "psi0", "bElev")

outA2 <- jags(bdata, NULL, wanted, "burn2.jags", DIC=FALSE,
        n.chains=3, n.iter=1e4)
mcoA2 <- mcmcOutput(outA2)
diagPlot(mcoA2)
plot(mcoA2)
summary(mcoA2)
#         mean    sd median   l95   u95  Rhat MCEpc
# p        0.032 0.003  0.032  0.026  0.038 0.999 0.739
# psi0[1]  0.661 0.125  0.666  0.419  0.899 1.000 1.105
# psi0[2]  0.850 0.076  0.860  0.702  0.983 0.999 0.965
# bElev   -1.020 0.532 -0.975 -2.074 -0.018 1.000 1.212

The elevation coefficient is definitely negative – occupancy declines with elevation. We’ll plot the curves for both burnt and unburnt sites. The code is similar to that for the willow tits, but we have to convert the two intercepts, psi0[1] and psi0[2], back to the logit scale.

# Convert psi0 back to b0
b0 <- qlogis(mcoA2$psi0)

# Create vector of elevations for the x axis
hist(leo$elev)  # only 1 site above 1200m
xx <- seq(250, 1200, , 101)

# Standardise in the same way that we standardised the original data
xxS <- standardize2match(xx, leo$elev)

# Get the values of the posterior mean and CrI for each value in xx
burnt <- unburnt <- matrix(NA, nrow=101, ncol=3)
for(i in 1:101) {
  logitPsi1 <- b0[,1] + mcoA2$bElev * xxS[i]
  psi1 <- plogis(logitPsi1)
  burnt[i, ] <- c(mean(psi1), hdi(psi1))
  logitPsi2 <- b0[,2] + mcoA2$bElev * xxS[i]
  psi2 <- plogis(logitPsi2)
  unburnt[i, ] <- c(mean(psi2), hdi(psi2))
}

plot(xx, unburnt[,1], type='n', ylim=range(burnt, unburnt),
    xlab="Elevation, m", ylab="Occupancy", las=1)
polygon(c(xx, rev(xx)), c(burnt[,2], rev(burnt[,3])), border=NA,
    col=adjustcolor('gray', 0.5))
polygon(c(xx, rev(xx)), c(unburnt[,2], rev(unburnt[,3])), border=NA,
    col=adjustcolor('skyblue', 0.5))
lines(xx, burnt[,1], lwd=2)
lines(xx, unburnt[,1], lwd=2, col='blue')
abline(v=mean(leo$elev), lty=3)
text(610, 0.3, 'mean elevation', pos=2) 
arrows(600, 0.3, 641, 0.3, length=0.1)
legend('bottomleft', c("burnt", "unburnt"),
    col=c('black', 'blue'), lwd=2, bty='n')

A couple of things are clear from the graph. First, the credible intervals are very wide; that should not be surprising given that we only have 20 sites in the burnt area and 27 in the unburnt area. Second, the effect of burning is modest compared to elevation: burnt sites at 250m have higher occupancy than unburnt sites at 1000m.

Results from before the fires

Now let’s turn to the data from before the fires, and see how occupancy compared between the soon-to-be-burnt sites and the unburnt sites.

Three of the 47 sites used for the second survey did not have camera traps during the first survey. They are the last 3 sites in the data table, and have n1 = 0 and y1 = 0. We can leave them in the data set even though they provide no information, or we can set nsites = 44, so that JAGS ignores the last 3 sites. We chose the latter for the code below.

z <- ifelse(leo$y1 > 0, 1, NA)  # Known occupancy
bdata <- with(leo, list(nSite=44, nOcc=n1, y=y1, fire=fireI,
    nCat=2, elev=standardize(elev), z=z))
str(bdata)
# List of 7
# $ nSite: num 44
# $ nOcc : int [1:47] 130 130 130 130 130 130 130 130 130 130 ...
# $ y    : int [1:47] 8 5 4 0 2 2 0 0 0 5 ...
# $ fire : int [1:47] 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 ...
# $ nCat : num 2
# $ elev : num [1:47] -1.227 0.87 -0.744 1.388 -0.817 ...
# $ z    : num [1:47] 1 1 1 NA 1 1 NA NA NA 1 ...

The code to run the model is the same, convergence is good, and here are the posterior plots:

The results are very similar, with higher occupancy at the burned sites even before the fires! Let’s get MCMC chains for the differences before and after and plot them together:

diffA2 <- mcoA2$psi0[,2] - mcoA2$psi0[,1]
diffB2 <- mcoB2$psi0[,2] - mcoB2$psi0[,1]
differences <- cbind(before=diffB2, after=diffA2)
postPlot(differences, compVal=0)

So, sure, occupancy was higher in the unburnt sites after the fires, but it was also higher in those sites before the fires. Indeed, the difference in occupancy has not changed as a result of the fires. Whatever is causing the difference, we can’t blame the fire.

The major lesson: don’t draw conclusions just by comparing impacted sites with controls. Look at data from before and after the impact. This is Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) design.

Download a ZIP file with the code and data here (includes NIMBLE code).

19 thoughts on “Occupancy with a categorical covariate”

  1. Hi, Mike:

    I appreciate a lot all your tutorial. All of them have been very helpful in my research (I am a master´s degree student from Colombia). I have a quick question, how should incorporate more than one categorical covariate in the model? My hipothesis included some continuous covariates and some categorical covs (presence of humans and presence of dogs). With these covariates would be better to use a Two species occupancy model or can I use them as categorical covariates? Thank you in advance.

  2. Hi Sebastian,

    If you know for sure where humans and dogs are absent, you can put that in as 0/1 in the expression for psi for the focal species. But if you are working with detection data for them (ie, there may be places where humans/dogs are present but not detected), you need a joint occupancy model, which is straightforward if the interaction is only one-way. See Bischof et al (2014, 10.1111/jzo.12100) and Waddle et al (2010, 10.1890/09-0850.1) for examples and code, also section 8.3 of Kéry and Royle (2021, ISBN: 978-0-12-809585-0) when that appears.

    Do you have dogs around without humans? If the dogs are only there where humans are around, you have a 3-state model with states (1) no humans or dogs, (2) humans but no dogs, (3) humans and dogs. For your target species, that would be a covar with 3 categories, but would have to consider non-detection of humans and/or dogs.

    1. Thank you for your quick answer.

      Actually, I can not be sure about the absences of humans and dogs. I collected that information through the search of signs and marks around my survey stations and also checking the images from the camera traps.

      I was thinking to use it as a categorical covariate because I am developing a multi-scale occupancy model and I am not sure how to integrate the “two species occupancy model” into the two states for occurrence in the multi-scale model (I have searched and haven´t found any paper using those approaches together). What would you recommend me to do? I do not want to discard the humans and dogs data, I think they are important.

      And I have data from dogs and humans alone and together.

      Thank you for your help.

  3. Mike,

    I don’t know if you still respond to these posts or not, but I figured I’d give this a shot.

    From reading over your post, I would assume that the categorical variable in the example (fire) is, in essence, being treated as a random effect. Thus, occupancy would be modeled as a random intercept in the model. Is that inference correct?

    I’m sorry if I seem wildly ignorant. I’m very new to the whole Bayesian thing and trying to select the appropriate model for an occupancy analysis, and this seems to be the model I’d want to use.

    Thanks!

    -Josh

  4. Mike,

    Quick question. Based on my understanding from your post, I would assume that fire in the model could be thought of as a random effect. Thus, the analyst could examine how the effects of the continuous covariates affect occupancy for the two different levels of fire. Is that logic correct?

    Thanks,

    Josh

    1. Hi Josh,

      Burnt and Unburnt are not being treated as random effects; we aren’t thinking of some population of categories from which these 2 are drawn, and not attempting to estimate parameters for such a population.

      If instead of Burnt/Unburnt our categories were, say, 6 different protected areas, it would make sense to think of the distribution of intercepts across the parks, and to have another level to model that. We could model the 6 b0’s as drawn from a normal distribution and estimate the mean and SD of that.

      If you thought that elevation had a different effect in Burnt vs Unburnt areas, you could have different values for bElev for each category. With 6 parks, it might make sense to have a higher level model for the 6 bElev’s.

  5. Mike,

    Wow, that was a very rapid reply. Thanks.

    Ok, so just to be clear: the fact that fire cannot be thought of as a true random effect (and thus psi[1] and psi[2] cannot be construed as random intercepts from the jags output in the example) in the model is due to a lack of levels (i.e., there’s only two in this case).

    This tutorial has helped me address a lot of my “beginner” questions about Bayesian hierarchical models. I didn’t have the opportunity to pursue a course in Bayesian statistics at my PhD program (currently new post-doc at Mizzou). However, I’m hoping to incorporate some of these approaches into my present research.

    Thanks again!

    -Josh

  6. Dear Mike,

    Thank you very much for your tutorials. They are very useful. Apologies if I’m asking too simple a question. Based on the model with the both categorical and continuous variables, how can I find out the eventual mean psi value & credible intervals across all the sites?

    Would it be just taking mean(psi0)?

    Thank you.

    Max

    1. mean(psi0) won’t do it, that gives some sort of “mid-point” of the two categories at mean elevation.

      Each site has its own value for psi, depending on the covariates. To get the mean across all the sites in the sample, you need to extract all the psis. To do that, just add psi to the list of parameters in wanted and rerun JAGS. outA2$sims.list$psi now has a column for each site, and you can get the mean with rowMeans(outA2$sims.list$psi), which will give an MCMC chain for mean(psi). Use postPlot to see the histogram with the posterior mean and CrI.

      1. Dear Mike,

        Thank you very much for your quick reply and for providing the code to this.

        I am using the code to analyse camera trap data for 3 species with covariates to obtain modeled occupancy estimates. I have obtained the posterior mean using the code, but this value is lower than the naïve occupancy for 2 of the 3 species.

        Will this ever be the case? Or would there likely to have been some error on my part somewhere?

        Thank you for your help.

        Max

  7. Dear Mike,
    thank you for this very helpful tutorial!!
    I have different covariates: continuous (e.g. percentage of habitat) and categorical (e.g. sites [4 levels]) in a multiseason single species model:
    logit(psi[i,k]) <- alpha0 + alpha1 * z[i,k-1] + alpha2 * human[i,k] +alpha3*ever[i,k]+alpha4*vill[i,k]+alpha5*elev[i,k] + alpha6*site[i]
    The model run, I do not know how to read results, because you obtain BCI for your covariates but seems that I can see a site effect but not which sites (like a posthoc for frequentist)
    I dont know if I'm missing something or I'm including the categorical covariate in a wrong way
    Thanks a lot

    1. That’s not the way to include a categorical variable in your model: site is a numeric vector with values 1 to 4; JAGS has no way to know that these are supposed to be categories and not some sort of measurement. The coefficient alpha6 needs to be a vector with 4 values, one for each category, and the regression expression should be ... + alpha6[site[i]]. You need to set one of the values of alpha6 to 0, to avoid confounding with the intercept, so your priors might look like this:

      alpha6[1] <- 0
      for(i in 2:4) {
        alpha6[i] ~ dunif(-5, 5) # ... or whatever you want for a prior
      }

      The value of the main expression refers to the first category of site and the values of alpha6[2:4] are the differences between the other categories and the first one.

      If you have only one categorical variable, you can simplify things by scrapping the intercept, or rather having a different intercept for each category. Instead of alpha6 you'd have alpha0[site[i]] and

      for(i in 1:4) {
        alpha0[i] ~ dunif(-5, 5)  # or whatever...
      }
      1. Dear Mike,
        thanks for the helpful and quick answer, the model run in both cases, great!
        So, JAGS has no way to know that covariates are supposed to be categories even if you set site as a factor of 4 levels (“S1″,”S2″,”S3″,”S4” : 1,2,3,4)?
        Thanks again and have a nice day
        Giacomo

  8. Sorry,
    I have also one more question,
    do you have or know some good example (possibly with JAGS code) of a community multiseason model with covariates? I would like to investigate covariates effect on p and psi with a community model structure
    Thanks again for your help

  9. Hi Mike, Your tutorials have been absolutely great. I have used your methods and those outlined in MacKenzie et al. 2017 to do some analyses for my job. I have run into a snag of doing small population adjustments with categorical variables. I have been trying to adapt the code in MacKenzie et al. 2017 with no luck. Any suggestion for estimating the non-surveyed sites by category?

    1. Ivan, Not sure what you mean here, but if you’ve surveyed most of the sites in the population and you have covariates for all of them (including of course the categories), you can put them all into the analysis: the unsurveyed sites will have all NAs for the observations. That will give you occupancy estimates, psi[i], for the unsurveyed sites.

  10. Hi Mike,

    Your site is really helpful, especially for beginners like me. I am not even sure if you are replying to comments here, but I will really appreciate your feedback.

    So right now I am just trying to replicate your example of occupancy with covariates (including categorical covariates) and I keep getting this error : “Index out of range taking subset of b0”

    And I get why it is happening but I am not sure about the solutions. Can you please please help here.

    My code is (in case I am doing anything different, which I am sure I am not)

    burn2.jags

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