11 - Illustration of HMSC Analyses

Summary

This chapter applies Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) to a real dataset on Finnish birds, with the aim of using the case study to simultaneously demonstrate the many uses of HMSC. Specifically, it illustrates the full workflow of a typical HMSC analysis, shows how the researcher can access the full posterior distribution to go beyond the default outputs of HMSC analyses, shows how predictions of HMSC can be used as a starting point for further analyses as well as compares HMSC outputs to results obtained by other statistical methods in community ecology. The chapter starts by outlining the five steps of the HMSC workflow, and then shows how the researcher can access the entire posterior distribution of model parameters or predictions, e.g. for examining the level of statistical support related to either of these. Next the chapter illustrates how one may use HMSC predictions as a starting point for applied research, such as spatial conservation prioritisation or bioregionalisation. Finally, the chapter applies other widely used methods in statistical community ecology such as ordination methods and co-occurrence analysis to the same data, with the aim of comparing how their results relate to those obtained by HMSC.