Comparing N-mixture models and GLMMs for relative abundance estimation in a citizen science dataset

To analyze species count data when detection is imperfect, ecologists need models to estimate relative abundance in the presence of unknown sources of heterogeneity. Two candidate models are generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) and hierarchical N-mixture models. GLMMs are computationally robust but do not explicitly separate detection from abundance patterns. N-mixture models separately estimate detection and abundance via a latent state but are sensitive to violations in assumptions and subject to practical estimation issues. When one can assume that detection is not systematically confounded with ecological patterns of interest, these two models can be viewed as sharing a heuristic framework for relative abundance estimation. Model selection can then determine which predicts observed counts best, for example by AIC. We compared four N-mixture model variants and two GLMM variants for predicting bird counts in local subsets of a citizen science dataset, eBird, based on model selection and goodness-of-fit measures. We found that both GLMMs and N-mixture models—especially N-mixtures with beta-binomial detection submodels—were supported in a moderate number of datasets, suggesting that both tools are useful and that relative fit is context-dependent. We provide faster software implementations of N-mixture likelihood calculations and a reparameterization to interpret unstable estimates for N-mixture models.