# Estimation of species relative abundances and habitat preferences using opportunistic data

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a statistical method that combines opportunistic and standardized data to accurately estimate species abundances and habitat preferences, correcting for biases and unknown habitat information.

## Contribution

It presents a novel approach to address habitat selection bias and unknown habitat data in opportunistic species monitoring.

## Key findings

- Successful estimation of bird species habitat preferences in Aquitaine
- Effective correction of bias in opportunistic data collection
- Estimation of habitat selection probabilities for multiple species

## 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).