## Statistical computing meets biodiversity conservation and natural resource management

#### Fitting removal models with the detect R package

In a paper recently published in the Condor, titled Evaluating time-removal models for estimating availability of boreal birds during point-count surveys: sample size requirements and model complexity, we assessed different ways of controlling for point-count duration in bird counts using data from the Boreal Avian Modelling Project. As the title indicates, the paper describes a cost-benefit analysis to make recommendations about when to use different types of the removal model. The paper is open access, so feel free to read the whole paper here.

#### Shiny slider examples with the intrval R package

The intrval R package is lightweight (~11K), standalone (apart from importing from graphics, has exactly 0 non-base dependency), and it has a very narrow scope: it implements relational operators for intervals — very well aligned with the tiny manifesto. In this post we will explore the use of the package in two shiny apps with sliders.

#### Phylogeny and species traits predict bird detectability

It all started with this paper in Methods in Ecol. Evol. where we looked at detectability of many species. So we wanted to use life history traits to validate our results. But we had to cut the manuscript, and there was this leftover with some neat patterns, but without much focus. It took a few years, and the most positive peer-review experience ever, and the paper is now early view in Ecography. This post is a quick summary of the goodies stuffed inside the lhreg R package that makes the whole analysis reproducible, and provides some functions for similar PGLMM models.

#### PVA: Publication Viability Analysis, round 3

A friend and colleague of mine, Péter Batáry has circulated news from Nature magazine about the EU freezing innovation funds to Bulgaria. The article had a figure about publication trends for Bulgaria, compared with Romania and Hungary. As I have blogged about such trends in ecology before (here and here), I felt the need to update my PVA models with two years worth of data from WoS.

#### The progress bar just got a lot cheaper

The pbapply R package that adds progress bar to vectorized functions has been know to accumulate overhead when calling parallel::mclapply with forking (see this post for more background on the issue). Strangely enough, a GitHub issue held the key to the solution that I am going to outline below. Long story short: forking is no longer expensive with pbapply, and as it turns out, it never was.

#### What is new in the intrval R package?

An update (v 0.1-1) of the intrval package was recently published on CRAN. The package simplifies interval related logical operations (read more about the motivation in this post). So what is new in this version? Some of the inconsistencies in the 1st CRAN release have been cleaned up, and I have been pushed hard (see GitHub issue to implement all the 16 interval-to-interval operators. These operators define the open/closed nature of the lower/upper limits of the intervals on the left and right hand side of the o in the middle as in c(a1, b1) %[]o[]% c(a2, b2).

### Publications

Allen, B., Morrison, S., Kariyeva, J., Sparkes, S., Hutchings, C., Hricko, B., Sólymos, P., Huggard, D., 2019. Data collection. In: Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), ABMI 10-year science and program review. pp. 29–64. —  fulltext PDF.

Sólymos, P., Azeria, E. T., Huggard, D. J., Roy, M.-C., Schieck, J., 2019. Predicting species status and relationships. In: Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), ABMI 10-year science and program review. pp. 65–97. —  fulltext PDF.

Páll-Gergely, B., Asami, T., and Sólymos, P., 2019. Subspecies description rates are higher in morphologically complex land snails. Zoologica Scripta, 48: 185–193. —  journal website.

Sólymos, P., Matsuoka, S. M., Cumming, S. G., Stralberg, D., Fontaine, P., Schmiegelow, F. K. A., Song, S. J., and Bayne, E. M., 2018. Evaluating time-removal models for estimating availability of boreal birds during point-count surveys: sample size requirements and model complexity. Condor, 120: 765–786. —  journal website fulltext PDF QPAD and detect R packages —  tutorial.

Fehér, Z., Majoros, G., Ötvös, S., Bajomi, B., and Sólymos, P., 2018. Black nerite – an aquatic snail reintroduction in Hungary. In: Soorae, P. S. (ed.) Global Re-introduction Perspectives: 2018—Case-studies from around the globe. IUCN/SSC Re-introduction Specialist Group (RSG), pp. 18–22. —  fulltext PDF.