Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC)
B-USEFUL celebrated from 22—24 February a HMSC (Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities) Training Workshop at the Institute of Marine Science (ICM, CSIC) in Barcelona (Spain). The workshop was kindly hosted by the members of the iMARES group lCM leaded Dr. Marta Coll. This WK was the first training activity associated to the WP 3 of the Project ‘Biodiversity status and cumulative impacts’ and. consisted in theoretical lectures given by Benjamin (Ben) Weigel combined by hands-on work of prepared exercises and on data of the own participants. Ben and Marcel Montanyès, PhD student at DTU, guided participants the use of HMSC models.
Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) is a general and flexible framework for fitting Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs). HMSC allows the integration of community ecology data with data on environmental covariates, species traits, phylogenetic relationships and the spatio-temporal context of the study, providing predictive insights into community assembly processes from non-manipulative observational data of species communities.
Scheme of JSDMs adapted from Jetz et al (2019, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0826-1 )
