Roberto Deck
The global distribution of wildlife is changing due to climate change. The co-occurrence patterns and interspecific interactions of native and invasive wildlife are expected to vary as a result of these distributional changes and the environmental and vegetative changes that prompted them. We worked on Sanibel Island, a low-lying barrier island in southwest Florida, the United States, that serves as a microcosm of planetary change. To the north, mangrove trees surrounded a freshwater interior on Sanibel Island. Sanibel was 50% built, 50% preserved, hydrologically degraded, encroached by shrubs, and vulnerable to flooding from sea level rise. We looked into how the co-occurrence patterns of two native island-endemic species Sanibel Island rice rat (Oryzomys palustris sanibeli) and insular hispid cotton rat Sigmodon hispidus) might change as a result of climate change using a Bayesian multispecies occupancy modelling approach.