Technological advances have enabled a new class of multivariate models for ecology, with the potential now to specify a statistical model for abundances jointly across many taxa, to simultaneously explore interactions across taxa and also the response of abundance to environmental variables
Results/Conclusions
Joint models can be used for a number of purposes of interest to ecologists, including: estimating patterns of residual correlation across taxa; ordination; multivariate inference about environmental effects and environment-by-trait interactions; accounting for missing predictors; improving predictions in situations where one can leverage knowledge of some species in order to predict others. We demonstrate this by example and discuss recent computation tools and future directions.