detection

Southern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger niger) have been declining due to habitat fragmentation, cover type conversion, and fire suppression in the Southeast. A decrease in growing season burns has led to hardwood encroachment and forest mesophication that benefit the competing eastern gray squirrels (S. carolinensis). In the southern Coastal Plain and Piedmont of Virginia, these pattern raises the question of whether gray squirrels are competitively excluding southern fox squirrels in these altered landscapes. From October 2019 to October 2020, we conducted continual...

Monitoring changes in occupancy (i.e., probability a site has at least one individual of a species) across time is considered an inexpensive alternative to monitoring changes in abundance and can be used to monitor multiple species simultaneously across a watershed. Occupancy can be measured as the proportion of sites where a species is detected during surveys (i.e., naïve occupancy), but is more commonly modeled by surveying sites multiple times to estimate detection probability and address false-positive survey errors (sites that are occupied but with no survey detections of the species...